Beyond U.S. election, Russian hackers had targets worldwide

WASHINGTON — The hackers didn’t just go after Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

They tried to break into the private email of the sitting U.S. secretary of state, attempted to steal the private correspondence of a manager working on Lockheed Martin’s stealth fighter program, and sought to break into the accounts of thousands of others, including the punk band Pussy Riot and Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

About 19,000 lines of data, recently shared by cyberse- curity firm Secureworks, show that Fancy Bear — the hacking group blamed by U.S. intelligence agencies for disrupting last year’s presidential election — tried to break into more than 4,700 Gmail inboxes in at least 116 countries from March 2015 to May 2016.

It’s effectively a hit list — one that experts say points to the Kremlin.

“There is only one country whose interests this list would serve,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five experts who reviewed AP’s findings.

“Regardless of the inevitable denials from Moscow, it is the only explanation that makes sense,” he said.

Russian officials have described claims that they orchestrated the hacking as “ludicrous” and “verging on fantasy.” On Wednesday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said there was “not a single piece of evidence” to back the allegations.

But the Fancy Bear targets identified by the AP tell a different story. In more than 100 interviews, many blamed Moscow for the hacking.

“We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks,” said Artem Torchinskiy, a Navalny lieutenant who was targeted by Fancy Bear in 2015. “I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services.”