MORE INSIDE
Cybersecurity experts see merit in claims of Russian hacking
Cybersecurity experts say signs point to Russia being behind the hack that revealed emails from the DNC.
PARIS — Experts who’ve followed the leak of Democratic National Committee documents say they believe the party’s claim that Moscow had a hand in the hack, lending weight to the extraordinary allegation that the Kremlin is trying to tamper with the U.S. presidential contest.
“You’re left with all the signs pointing to Moscow,” said Matt Tait, a U.K.-based cybersecurity consultant who has put in roughly 20 hours combing through the leaked DNC documents.
Tait and others invoke several categories of evidence. The first was provided by threat intelligence firm CrowdStrike, an Irvine company that was hired by the Democrats to clean out the party’s network. It delivered a report last month identifying Russia’s intelligence services as being behind two separate electronic break-ins at the DNC. The second category of evidence was provided by electronic fingerprints on some of the documents suggesting the files had been run through Russian language-configured machines.
Most convincing for Tait was evidence that the Internet infrastructure tied the DNC hackers to a separate campaign that targeted Germany’s parliament last year. In May, Germany’s domestic intelligence chief took the unusual step of publicly blaming that attack on Moscow, saying the Kremlin wasn’t just spying — it was gearing up for sabotage.
“More than anything else I think (that) really puts to rest the ‘Who is this?’ ” Tait said Tuesday. “It’s one thing to say that they were typing stuff in Russian or they were coming from a Russian IP (Internet protocol) address or their systems were configured in Russian. It’s another thing to say this was being run by the same servers being publicly attributed by German intelligence as being Russian.”
A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday called the allegation “paranoid.”
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Monday that there was “no proof” Russia was behind the hack.
On Tuesday, leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee pressed the FBI and Justice Department for details on the investigation, including how and when federal investigators learned of the breach and what action is being taken in response.
So far the only public claim of responsibility for the breach has come from a previously unknown actor calling himself Guccifer 2.0. The self-described lone Romanian hacker has uploaded several tranches of DNC material to a website in the past month and boasted of handing a larger trove to WikiLeaks.
Guccifer 2.0 has not responded to repeated messages from The Associated Press, but doubts about his story are growing. On Tuesday, ThreatConnect, an intelligence firm based in Arlington, Virginia, said it found evidence that the hacker was communicating with journalists via a dedicated virtual private network based out of Russia.