The “lone hacker” who provided WikiLeaks with a trove of emails from the Democratic National Committee was an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate, GRU, and working out of their Moscow headquarters at the time of the massive hack.
The Daily Beast reported Thursday that special counsel Robert Mueller has taken over the investigation into the hacker, known as Guccifer 2.0, and has brought in FBI agents who discovered the hacker’s Russian identity.
The hacker, whose identity is still not publicly known, failed to activate their virtual private networking, or VPN, service, which exposed his or her Internet Protocol address as one of a GRU officer working in the agency’s Moscow headquarters.
A source familiar with the investigation said the IP address was found in the server logs of an American social media company. Guccifer had been using Twitter and WordPress, but those accounts haven’t been active since January of last year.
Mueller’s team has not commented on what action they plan to take with Guccifer 2.0, but this would be the first known connection the special counsel made with Kremlin officials working to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
In February, Mueller indicted 13 Russian nationals associated with the Internet Research Agency troll farm and three Russian entities for meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Guccifer 2.0 previously denied having any Russian connections last January, calling such allegations a “crude fake.”
