Hacker Guccifer 2.0 claims DNC hack, leaks documents to prove it
An individual that goes by the handle “Guccifer 2.0” has claimed responsibility for the US Democratic National Committee (DNC) hack, and has released documents that apparently prove his (or her) involvement.
The leaked files include a 230+ pages long document that could be the opposition research on Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump (titled simply “Donald Trump Report”), purported lists of Democratic Party donors and the amounts they donated to the party, Hillary Clinton’s election plans, and more.
“The main part of the papers, thousands of files and mails, I gave to Wikileaks. They will publish them soon,” Guccifer 2.0 claims, and says that breaching the DNC was “easy, very easy.”
“Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers. But he certainly wasn’t the last. No wonder any other hacker could easily get access to the DNC’s servers,” he commented, referring to the Romanian hacker who was extradited to the US and recently plead guilty to the charges that he gained unauthorized access to personal email and social media accounts belonging to approximately 100 Americans, including family members of former US presidents and former government and military officials.
The authenticity of the documents is yet to be confirmed, but CrowdSrike – the company that was called in to investigate the breach and believes that it was the work of two Russian hacker groups – has stated that it “stands fully by its analysis and findings identifying two separate Russian intelligence-affiliated adversaries present in the DNC network in May 2016.”
“Whether or not [Guccifer 2.0’s posting] is part of a Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign, we are exploring the documents’ authenticity and origin. Regardless, these claims do nothing to lessen our findings relating to the Russian government’s involvement, portions of which we have documented for the public and the greater security community.”
Gawker has more about the contents of the leaked documents, and points out that the metadata says that the Donald Trump opposition research file was created by a Democratic strategist named Warren Flood on December 19th, 2015. They attempted to contact Flood to confirm the authenticity of the file, but were unsuccessful.
Donald Trump commented the release by claiming the DNC “did the ‘hacking’ as a way to distract from the many issues facing their deeply flawed candidate and failed party leader.”