Firm pieces together Podesta hack timeline

Circumstantial evidence uncovered fingers Russia

WASHINGTON — Nineteen thousand lines of raw data associated with the theft of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign staffers show how the hackers managed the election-shaking operation.

Minute-by-minute logs gathered by the cybersecurity company Secureworks and recently shared with The Associated Press suggest it took the hackers just over a week of work to zero in on and penetrate the personal Gmail account of campaign chairman John Podesta.

“They were the most security-aware campaign that I’m aware of,” said Markus Jakobsson, the chief scientist at email security company Agari. “And yet this happened.”

Hillaryclinton.com emails were locked down using two-factor authentication, a technique that uses a second passcode to keep accounts secure.

But hackers quickly learned their way around the campaign’s address book, first targeting senior staffers at work before switching to their Gmail inboxes, some of which had not been protected with two-factor authentication.

On March 19, 2016, the hackers appear to have broken into Podesta’s personal inbox, setting the stage for weeks of embarrassing disclosures.

Overall, the analysis documented well over 400 attempts to break into Clinton staffers and Democratic operatives between March and May 2016, an illustration of what Jakobsson said is a key principal behind most phishing attempts.

“If you try enough, sooner or later you’ll be lucky,” he said.

The hackers who hit Podesta acted globally in close alignment with the Russian government’s interests, backing assessments made by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian spies were responsible.

Here’s a review of the evidence:

■ The hackers worked Moscow business hours.

They created nearly all their links from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Moscow time, according to the analysis. They were busiest in the midday hours and took weekends off.

■ Russian rivals and global trouble spots dominate the targeted countries.

At least 573 individuals or groups were targeted in the United States, which has been a focus of Russian spying since the Soviet era.

Ukraine, where Russia is backing separatist rebels against the government in Kiev, came in second with 545 targets.

Other countries that were the focus of the operation were former Soviet republic Georgia; Syria, where Russia has been backing the government in a bloody civil war; and Russia itself, where many government opponents were targeted.

■ Weeks after the hack, a Trump adviser was told that emails were in Russian hands.

In recently unsealed court documents, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser said he was told by a professor closely connected to the Russian government that the Kremlin had obtained thousands of emails with “dirt” about Clinton.

■ Experts who’ve examined the list say it’s Russia.

“It doesn’t seem plausible that there is another country that would look to target the exact same set of people,” said Secureworks senior security researcher Rafe Pilling.

Matt Rourke The Associated Press John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, was targeted in March 2016 by a malicious link generated by a group of hackers.