Russian Hacker Group Guccifer 2.0 Allegedly Pwns Clinton Foundation Exposing Large Contributions
The Clinton Foundation and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were a few of the organizations breached by suspected Russian hacker group Guccifer 2.0. The hackers siphoned data for about seven month from at least 4,000 individuals associated with U.S. politics such as party aides, advisers, lawyers and foundations.
This latest hack was detected as early as last week. Guccifer 2.0 posted a number of documents on Tuesday that were supposedly from the DNC. These documents included a list of donors who had made large contributions to the Clinton Foundation. The hackers want to publish inflammatory and incriminating documents in order to shame all of the current presidential candidates. A similar situation occurred to Sony in 2014 in which thousands of inflammatory internal e-mails filled with gossip about world leaders and Hollywood stars were made public (as well as roughly 47,000 social security numbers).
U.S. officials had informed both political parties and the presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders that hackers were trying to infiltrated their computers. Trump earlier remarked that he believed the hack was a ploy by the Democratic party, while a Sanders representative claimed they had been unaware of the cyber-attack. The Trump campaign stated that they would use any relevant information gleaned from the breach against the Clinton campaign.
These attacks and government warnings raise questions about whether the parties and campaigns have done enough to secure their systems. The Clinton campaign was aware as early as April that it had been targeted by hackers with links to the Russian government on at least four recent occasions. The United States Secret Service, FBI, and NSA are all involved in the investigation. The FBI has been careful to keep that investigation separate from the review of Clinton’s use of private email.
CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm currently working for the DNC, claimed that the Russian government was behind the breach. Separately, analysis by Fidelis confirmed that groups linked to Russian intelligence agencies were behind the DNC hack.
