How Russian hackers hit Clinton campaign

Nineteen thousand lines of raw data associated with the theft of Hillary Clinton campaign emails shows how the hackers dodged strict security measures.

Minute-by-minute logs gathered by cybersecurity company Secureworks and shared with the Associated Press reveal it took the hackers just over a week to zero in on and penetrate the personal Gmail of campaign chairman John Podesta.

One outside expert who reviewed the data said it showed how even the well-defended Clinton campaign fell prey to phishing, a cyberespionage technique which uses bogus emails to harvest passwords.

The first 29 phishing emails were almost all misfires. Addressed to people who worked for Clinton during her first presidential run, the messages bounced back untouched. Except one.

Within nine days, some of the campaign’s most consequential secrets would be in the hackers’ hands, part of a massive operation aimed at vacuuming up millions of messages from thousands of inboxes across the world.

It wasn’t just a few aides the hackers went after; it was an all-out blitz across the Democratic Party. They tried to compromise Clinton’s inner circle and more than 130 party employees, supporters and contractors.

The AP drew on forensic data to report the hackers known as Fancy Bear were closely aligned with the interests of the Russian government.

AP’s reconstruction helps explain how a Russian-linked intermediary could boast to a Trump policy adviser, a month later, that the Kremlin had “thousands of emails” worth of dirt on Clinton.