Guccifer ID’d as Kremlin spook

The hacker Guccifer 2.0, who stole Democratic National Committee e-mails that turned the 2016 presidential election upside down, has been identified as a Russian military intelligence officer thanks to a clue he accidentally left online, a report said Thursday.

The identity was uncovered by FBI agents who have now been brought on board special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe, The Daily Beast reported.

Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign adviser who said he had contacted Guccifer 2.0, had insisted the hacker wasn’t Russian, just a lone-wolf Romanian who hacked the DNC as a lark.

Guccifer 2.0 became a personality on the WordPress blogging platform and Twitter, always claiming to be Romanian.

Cybersleuths had been trying to track the hacker through metadata in his e-mails but were thrown off the trail by a virtual-privatenetworking service that concealed his true location, The Daily Beast reported.

But Guccifer 2.0 slipped up once and failed to activate the service, exposing his actual Internet Protocol address in Moscow, a source familiar with the US government’s hunt told The Daily Beast.

It was enough to reveal Guccifer as an officer with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence agency, working out of its headquarters in the Russian capital, The Daily Beast said.

The hacker’s claims of being a lone actor from Romania were dubious from the start, said Kyle Ehmke, of the security firm ThreatConnect, which had tried to track down the hacker.

“We started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily . . . by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise,” Ehmke told news site.