Tag Archives: Democratic Party

FBI Probes Hacks targeting phones of Democratic Party officials

The headquarters of the Democratic National Committee is seen in Washington,

By Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The FBI is investigating suspected attempts to hack mobile phones used by Democratic Party officials as recently as the past month, four people with direct knowledge of the attack and the investigation told Reuters.

The revelation underscores the widening scope of the U.S. criminal inquiry into cyber attacks on Democratic Party organizations, including the presidential campaign of its candidate, former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

U.S. officials have said they believe those attacks were orchestrated by hackers backed by the Russian government, possibly to disrupt the Nov. 8 election in which Clinton faces Republican Party candidate Donald Trump. Russia has dismissed allegations it was involved in cyber attacks on the organizations.

The more recent attempted phone hacking also appears to have been conducted by Russian-backed hackers, two people with knowledge of the situation said.

Federal Bureau of Investigation representatives had no immediate comment, and a Clinton campaign spokesman said they were unaware of the suspected phone hacking.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) did not respond to a request for comment. An official of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) said that nobody at the organization had been contacted by investigators about possible phone hacking.

Interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile told CNN: “Our struggle with the Russian hackers that we announced in June is ongoing – as we knew it would be – and we are choosing not to provide general updates unless personal data or other sensitive information has been accessed or stolen.”

FBI agents had approached a small number of Democratic Party officials to discuss concerns their mobile phones may have been compromised by hackers, people involved said. It was not clear how many people were targeted by the hack or whether they included members of Congress, a possibility that could raise additional security concerns for U.S. officials.

‘OFFICE BRAIN’

If they were successful, hackers could have been able to acquire a wide range of data from targeted cellphones, including call data, text messages, emails, photos and contact lists, one person with knowledge of the situation said.

“In a sense, your phone is your office brain,” said Bruce Schneier, a cyber security expert with Resilient, an IBM company, which is not involved in the investigation. “It’s incredibly intimate.”

“Anything that’s on your phone, if your phone is hacked, the hacker can get it.”

The FBI has asked some of those whose phones were believed to have hacked to turn over their phones so that investigators could “image” them, creating a copy of the device and related data.

U.S. investigators are looking into whether hackers used data stolen from servers run by Democratic organizations or the private emails of their employees to get access to cellphones, one person said.

Hackers previously targeted servers used by the DNC, the body that sets strategy for the party, and the DCCC, which raises money for Democrats running for seats in the House of Representatives, officials have said.

Clinton said during Monday’s presidential debate there was “no doubt” Russia has sponsored hacks against “all kinds of organizations in our country” and mentioned Russian President Vladimir Putin by name.

“Putin is playing a really tough, long game here. And one of the things he’s done is to let loose cyber attackers to hack into government files, to hack into personal files, hack into the Democratic National Committee,” Clinton said.

Trump countered that there was no definitive proof that Russia had sponsored the hacks of Democratic organizations.

“I don’t think anybody knows it was Russia that broke into the DNC,” he said. “It could be Russia, but it could also be China. It could also be lots of other people.”

(Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by Kevin Krolicki and Grant McCool)

Democratic Party says it was hacked again, blames Russians

nternet LAN cables are pictured in this photo illustration taken in Sydney June 23, 2011. Australia cleared a key hurdle on Thursday in setting up a $38 billion high-speed broadband system after phone operator Telstra agreed to rent out its network for the nation's biggest infrastructure project in decades.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of the Democratic National Committee said on Tuesday the organization had been hacked by Russian state-sponsored agents who were trying to influence the U.S. presidential election, after a similar leak in July roiled the party.

A link to the documents was posted on WikiLeaks’ Twitter account and attributed to alleged hacker Guccifer 2.0. The release came during a presentation on Tuesday from a person speaking on behalf of Guccifer 2.0 at a London cyber security conference, Politico reported.

Reuters could not immediately access the documents.

“There’s one person who stands to benefit from these criminal acts, and that’s (Republican presidential nominee) Donald Trump,” DNC interim Chair Donna Brazile said in a statement.

“Not only has Trump embraced (Russian President Vladimir)Putin, he publicly encouraged further Russian espionage to help his campaign,” she said.

Trump in July invited Russia to dig up emails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state, prompting Democrats to accuse him of urging foreigners to spy on Americans. He later said he was speaking sarcastically.

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned as DNC chair on the eve of July’s Democratic National Convention after WikiLeaks published an earlier trove of hacked DNC emails that showed party officials favoring eventual nominee Hillary Clinton over U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders during the party’s nominating contests. Three other senior officials also stepped down from the DNC after the leak.

“We have been anticipating that an additional batch of documents stolen by Russian agents would be released,” said Brazile, who took over from Wasserman Schultz on an interim basis.

Democratic Party sources said the party and Clinton’s presidential campaign were deeply concerned about possible publication by WikiLeaks or other hackers of a new torrent of potentially embarrassing party information ahead of the Nov. 8 election.

(Reporting by Eric Beech and Mark Hosenball; Editing by Peter Cooney)

Putin says he doesn’t know who hacked U.S. Democratic Party

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Vladivostok

By Jack Stubbs

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin said he did not know who was behind the hacking of U.S. Democratic Party organizations but the information uncovered was important, Bloomberg news agency reported on Friday.

In an interview two days before a G20 meeting in China with U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders, Putin said it might be impossible to establish who engineered the release of sensitive Democratic Party emails but it was not done by the Russian government.

“Does it even matter who hacked this data?” Putin said. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public.”

“There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it,” he added. “But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.”

The hacked emails, released by activist group WikiLeaks in July, appeared to show favoritism within the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and prompted the resignation of the body’s chairwoman.

A computer network used by Clinton’s campaign, and the party’s fundraising committee for the U.S. House of Representatives were also hacked.

Clinton, who polls show as leading Donald Trump in the campaign for the U.S. presidential election in November, has said Russian intelligence services conducted a cyber attack against her party. Some officials have suggested Moscow is trying to influence the U.S. election.

Putin dismissed the allegations. “We have never interfered, are not interfering and do not intend to interfere in domestic politics,” he said.

“We will carefully watch what happens and wait for the election results. Then we are ready to work with any American administration, if they want to themselves.”

Relations between Russia and United States hit a post-Cold War low in 2014 over the Ukraine crisis, and Washington and Moscow have since clashed over diverging policies in Syria.

Obama said in August he would discuss the cyber attack with Putin if Russia was responsible, but it would not “wildly” alter the two countries’ relationship.

The U.S. election contest has been hard fought and frequently dominated by both candidates’ attitudes toward Russia.

Clinton has rounded on her Republican rival Trump for his perceived praise of Putin and what she says is an “absolute allegiance” to Russia’s foreign policy aims. Trump, in return, has said Clinton’s own close ties to the Russian president deserve greater scrutiny.

Putin said both candidates were using shock tactics and that playing “the anti-Russian card” was short-sighted.

“I wouldn’t like for us to follow their example,” he said. “I don’t think they are setting the best example.”

(Reporting by Katya Golubkova,; Writing by Jack Stubbs,; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Mark Trevelyan)

U.S. theory on Democratic Party breach: Hackers meant to leave Russia’s mark

secure URL picture

By John Walcott, Joseph Menn and Mark Hosenball

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Some U.S. intelligence officials suspect that Russian hackers who broke into Democratic Party computers may have deliberately left digital fingerprints to show Moscow is a “cyberpower” that Washington should respect.

Three officials, all speaking on condition of anonymity, said the breaches of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) were less sophisticated than other cyber intrusions that have been traced to Russian intelligence agencies or criminals.

For example, said one official, the hackers used some Cyrillic characters, worked during Russian government business hours but not on Russian religious or political holidays.”Either these guys were incredibly sloppy, in which case it’s not clear that they could have gotten as far as they did without being detected, or they wanted us to know they were Russian,” said the official.

Private sector cyber security experts agreed that the evidence clearly points to Russian hackers but dismissed the idea that they intentionally left evidence of their identities.

These experts – who said they have examined the breach in detail – said the Cyrillic characters were buried in metadata and in an error message. Other giveaways, such as a tainted Internet protocol address, also were difficult to find.

Russian hacking campaigns have traditionally been harder to track than China’s but not impossible to decipher, private sector experts said. But the Russians have become more aggressive and easier to detect in the past two years, security experts said, especially when they are trying to move quickly.

False flags have grown more common, but the government and private experts do not believe that is involved in the DNC case.

The two groups of hackers involved are adept at concealing their intrusions, said Laura Galante, head of global threat intelligence at FireEye, whose Mandiant subsidiary conducted forensic analysis of the attack and corroborated the findings of another cyber company, CrowdStrike.

Russian officials have dismissed the allegations of Moscow’s involvement as absurd. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in his only response to reporters, said: “I don’t want to use four-letter words.”

EMBARRASSING EMAILS

While private cyber experts and the government were aware of the political party’s hacking months ago, embarrassing emails were leaked last weekend by the WikiLeaks anti-secrecy group just as the Democratic Party prepared to anoint Hillary Clinton as its presidential candidate for the Nov. 8 election.

DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, resigned after the leaked emails showed party leaders favoring Clinton over her rival in the campaign for the nomination, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The committee is supposed to be neutral.

The U.S. intelligence officials conceded that they had based their views on deductive reasoning and not conclusive evidence, but suggested Russia’s aim probably was much broader than simply undermining Clinton’s campaign.

They said the hack fit a pattern of Russian President Vladimir Putin pushing back on what he sees as the United States and its European allies trying to weaken Russia.

“Call it the cyber equivalent of buzzing NATO ships and planes using fighters with Russian flags on their tails,” said one official.

Two sources familiar with Democratic Party investigations into the hacking said the private email accounts of Democratic Party officials were targeted as well as servers.

They said that the FBI had advised the DNC that it was looking into the hacking of the individual officials’ private accounts. They also said the FBI also requested additional information identifying the personal email accounts of certain party officials.

The DNC hired CrowdStrike to investigate the hack. It spent about six weeks, from late April to about June 11 or 12, monitoring the systems and watching while the hackers – who they believed were Russian – operated inside the systems, one of the sources said.

What actions, if any, the Obama administration will take are unclear and could depend on what diplomatic considerations may ultimately be involved, a former White House cyber security official said.

In past cases, administration officials have decided to publicly blame North Korea and indict members of China’s military for hacking because the administration decided that the net benefit of public shaming – and increased awareness brought to cyber security – outweighed potential risks, the former official said.

But “the Russia calculation is far more difficult and precarious,” the former official said. “Russia is a much more aggressive, capable foreign actor both in the traditional military sense and in the cyber realm” and that made public attribution or covert retaliation much less likely.

The former official, and a source familiar with the Democratic Party investigations, said that they also were unaware of any U.S. intelligence clearly demonstrating that WikiLeaks had received the hacked materials directly from Russians or that WikiLeaks’ release of the materials was in any way directed by Russians.

(Reporting By John Walcott, Joseph Menn and Mark Hosenball; Additional reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by David Rohde and Grant McCool)

Kremlin say allegations it hacked U.S. Democratic Party ‘made up horror stories’

Delegates cheer at the annoucement that Hillary Clinton is named the Democratic Party nominee for president at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia

MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin on Wednesday dismissed allegations Russia had hacked Democratic Party emails as “horror stories” dreamt up by U.S. politicians, saying it never interfered in other countries’ election campaigns.

“Moscow is at pains to avoid any words that could be interpreted as direct or indirect interference in the election process,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters.

“… We see that the Russian card is in the red corner on the writing table of all Washington politicians during the election campaign, and that very often they make it a trump card in their game.”

Peskov was responding after U.S. President Barack Obama in an interview with NBC News said it was possible Russia would try to influence the U.S. presidential election after a leak of Democratic National Committee emails that experts have blamed on Russian hackers.

“This reminds me of a company where they tell each other horror stories and then start being frightened of their own stories,” said Peskov.

The Kremlin on Tuesday said unidentified individuals in the United States were trying to cynically exploit fear of Russia for electoral purposes.

(Reporting by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Andrew Osborn)

Behind Democrats’ email leak, U.S. experts see a Russian subplot

By Mark Hosenball and Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – If the Russian government is behind the theft and release of embarrassing emails from the Democratic Party, as U.S. officials have suggested, it may reflect less a love of Donald Trump or enmity for Hillary Clinton than a desire to discredit the U.S. political system.

A U.S. official who is taking part in the investigation said that intelligence collected on the hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails released by Wikileaks on Friday “indicates beyond a reasonable doubt that it originated in Russia.”

The timing on the eve of Clinton’s formal nomination this week for the Nov. 8 presidential election has raised questions about whether Russia may have been trying to hurt her, to help Trump, her Republican rival, or to fan populist sentiment against establishment politicians as it has sought to do across Europe in recent years.

“Certainly Russia has become a master at manipulating information for their strategic goals: Witness the information bubble they have created for their threatening behavior in the Crimea, the Ukraine and elsewhere,” said former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden. “A step like this, however, would be really upping their game.”

The emails showed that DNC officials explored ways to undermine U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign against Clinton and raised questions about whether Sanders, who is Jewish, was really an atheist.

The disclosures confirmed Sanders’ frequent charge that the party played favorites against him and clouded a party convention Clinton hoped would signal unity, not division.

PUTIN’S COUNTERPUNCH?

Two U.S. intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the hack could be part of a broader campaign by Russian President Vladimir Putin to push back against what he thinks is an effort by the European Union and NATO, a military alliance of European and North American democracies, to encircle and weaken Russia.

One of the officials called the fear “a hangover” from Putin’s service in the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency.

“Time and again, we’re seeing Russia push back at what Putin considers Russia’s mortal enemies,” said the other official. “He’s been actively attacking the U.S.-backed rebels in Syria, buzzing ships and planes in the Black Sea and the Baltic, not to mention invading Ukraine and seizing Crimea. This fits the pattern.”

Despite Clinton’s short-lived attempt as secretary of state to “reset” U.S.-Russian relations after U.S. President Barack Obama took office in 2009, the leaked emails could damage a candidate the Kremlin may consider hostile and benefit her opponent, who has been friendlier.

Putin accused Clinton of stirring up protests against his rule after a December 2011 Russian parliamentary election that was marred by allegations of fraud, saying she had encouraged “mercenary” Kremlin foes by criticizing the vote.

“She set the tone for some opposition activists, gave them a signal, they heard this signal and started active work,” Putin told supporters.

Asked about claims that Russian intelligence had hacked the DNC to obtain the emails, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told NBC News’ Richard Engel “there is no proof of that whatsoever” and said “this is a diversion” pushed by the Clinton campaign.

TRUMP’S WARMER TONEAnalysts said Russia’s goal may be much broader than simply meddling in the U.S. presidential election.

“It’s a gross oversimplification to suggest that the Russian government is all-in for Donald Trump,” said Andrew Weiss, a Russia analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.

“It’s in Russia’s interest … to portray the United States as riven with popular discontent, xenophobia and high-level political corruption,” Weiss said. “It fits nicely with the Kremlin’s standard narrative … that the White House rushes to criticize others without getting its own house in order.”

The Russian leader may well have been encouraged by Trump’s comments to The New York Times last week that with him in the White House, NATO might not automatically defend the Baltic states that were once a part of the Russian-led Soviet Union.

Despite public Trump-Putin exchanges of praise, Eugene Rumer, a former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, warned against reaching any quick conclusions about Putin’s view of Trump.

“We can say with some degree of confidence that they don’t like Hillary,” Rumer said. “It’s less clear that they like Trump, although over the years the Russians have said they prefer to deal with the Republicans – (that) they are kind of hard-line but they can do deals.”

A diplomat with experience working on Russia said the Kremlin also might be betting that Clinton will win and is sending a shot across her bow.

“Messing with her like this now puts her on notice that these are tough guys that she’s got to be really careful with,” said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

A U.S. intelligence official who is reviewing the emails as part of the investigation into their origin said that those emails describing the privileges the Democratic National Committee showers on its wealthiest donors bolster the Russian narrative of an American political system rigged by the wealthy and riddled with corruption.

“In addition to countering the U.S. narrative that the Russian government is a corrupt oligarchy, leaking these emails fits rather conveniently with Trump’s charges about a rigged system and ‘crooked Hillary’,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss domestic politics.

(Reporting by Mark Hosenball, Arshad Mohammed and John Walcott.; Additional reporting by Jonathan Landay; Writing by Arshad Mohammed; Editing by John Walcott and Howard Goller)