Obama points to Russia on DNC hack

WASHINGTON >> Russia may have been behind the leak of hacked Democratic National Committee documents, President Barack Obama said Tuesday in his first public comments on the breach.

Asked whether Moscow was trying to influence the presidential election, Obama said, “Anything’s possible.”

Obama, who traditionally avoids commenting on active FBI investigations, broke with that protocol and noted that outside experts have blamed Russia for the leak. He leaned heavily into the notion that President Vladimir Putin may have reason to facilitate the attack.

“What the motives were in terms of the leaks, all that — I can’t say directly,” Obama told NBC News. “What I do know is that Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin.”

Obama said he was basing his assessment on Trump’s own comments and the fact that the GOP presidential nominee has “gotten pretty favorable coverage back in Russia.” He added that the U.S. knows that “Russians hack our systems — not just government systems, but private systems.”

The FBI hasn’t publicly attributed the attack to Russia, but Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign has, suggesting the goal was to benefit Trump’s campaign. A spokesman for Putin on Tuesday called the allegation “paranoid.”

Experts who’ve followed the leak say they agree 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, California, 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.”

Trump tweeted Tuesday that the Democrats were trying to “deflect the horror and stupidity” of the leak, calling the suggestion “crazy!” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who began publishing thousands of the emails last week, said Monday there’s was “no proof” Russia was behind the hack, and on Tuesday told CNN that “a lot more” material was on its way.

Also Tuesday, Senate Judiciary Committee leaders 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.

Assigning blame in the world of cyberespionage is extraordinarily difficult. Some of the clues uncovered by Tait are easy to forge and attackers routinely use misdirection to lead investigators astray. Others in the field are wary of companies such as CrowdStrike, which may face pressure from clients or investors to spin gripping stories about government hackers with codenames like “Fancy Bear” or “APT28.”