USA TODAY International Edition
It will be hard to prove Russians are behind DNC hack, experts say
SAN FRANCISCO Computer security researchers say it’s difficult to definitively say the cyber theft of files from the Democratic National Committee was perpetrated by Russian hackers as some media outlets have reported.
“Just because you find an AK- 47 at a crime scene doesn’t mean a Russian pulled the trigger,” said J. J. Thompson, chief executive of Rook Security, an Indianapolis- based firm.
On Friday, WikiLeaks released what it said were 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from leaders at the Democratic National Committee.
The documents, which the DNC has not dismissed as fraudulent, show antipathy toward Bernie Sanders, who had hoped to win the party’s presidential nomination.
They infuriated Sanders supporters and led to U. S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s announcement she would step down as the committee’s chair.
On Sunday, Hillary Clinton’s cam- paign manager, Robby Mook, said on ABC’s This Week that the emails had been extracted by the Russians to help Donald Trump’s campaign. To support his claim, Mook cited “experts.”
Mook added to this charge Monday, telling reporters, “All we know right now is what experts are telling us,” which is that “Russian state actors were feeding the emails to hackers for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.”
In an article published Monday, The New York Times reported that researchers at CrowdStrike, an Irvine, Calif.- based cyber- security firm, had concluded the breach was the work of two Russian intelligence agencies, or people working for or with them.
CrowdStrike declined to comment for this article. However, in May and June it blogged that an analysis it had completed of the long- known intrusion into the DNC’s computer network was the work of Russian intelligence- affiliated adversaries, one of whom it called Cozy Bear and the other Fancy Bear.
CrowdStrike said that it had run into both of these groups in previous attacks.
“Both adversaries engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government’s powerful and highly capable intelligence services,” Dmitri Alperovitch, the company’s cofounder, wrote in its blog.
However, experts within the cybersecurity world say it’s extremely difficult to know exactly who is behind an attack without the kind of on- theground surveillance that only government agencies are able to provide.
The FBI said in a statement that it was investigating the intrusion into the DNC’s computer network.
“Russian state actors were feeding the emails to hackers for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager