REALITY WINNER OF GEORGIA ACCUSED OF LEAKING SECRETS
WASHINGTON • A federal contractor has been arrested following the leak of a classified intelligence report that suggests Russian hackers attacked at least one U.S. voting software supplier days before last year’s presidential election.
Shortly after the release of the report by The Intercept on Monday, the Justice Department announced it had charged government contractor Reality Leigh Winner in Georgia with leaking a classified report containing “top secret level” information to an online news organization. The report the contractor allegedly leaked is dated May 5, the same date as the document The Intercept posted online.
The report suggests election-related hacking penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than previously known. A Kremlin spokesman denied the report.
The classified National Security Agency report does not say whether the hacking had any effect on election results. But it says Russian military intelligence attacked a U.S. voting software company and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials last fall.
The document said Russian military intelligence “executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016 evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions, according to information that became available in April 2017.” Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, denied the allegations Tuesday.
The hackers are believed to have then used data from that operation to create an email account to launch a spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations, the document said. “Lastly, the actors send test emails to two non-existent accounts ostensibly associated with absentee balloting, presumably with the purpose of creating those accounts to mimic legitimate services.”
The Intercept, a digital magazine founded by journalists involved in the release of documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said some material was withheld at U.S. intelligence agencies’ request because it wasn’t “clearly in the public interest.”
Winner, 25, is charged with copying classified documents and mailing them to a reporter with an unnamed news organization. Prosecutors did not say which federal agency Winner worked for, but FBI agent Justin Garrick said in an affidavit that she had previously served in the Air Force and held a top-secret security clearance.