Hackers linked to the Russian government have been roaming the systems of the Democratic National Committee for a year, officials confirmed on Tuesday.
“When we discovered the intrusion, we treated this like the serious incident it is and reached out to CrowdStrike immediately. Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network,” DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., said in a statement. “The security of our system is critical to our operation and to the confidence of the campaigns and state parties we work with.”
The hackers made off with the committee’s internal communications and, most notably, its opposition research file on Donald Trump. The groups CrowdStrike identified in the system included “Fancy Bear,” linked to Russian military intelligence service GRU, and “Cozy Bear,” related to the country’s Federal Security Service.
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Cozy Bear is the same group responsible for breaking into unclassified systems at the White House, State Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2014.
Security officials have speculated about the effort being made by Chinese and Russian intelligence services to build a detailed database on Americans, a practice the countries engage in through a combination of hacking and simple social media use. Russia is generally understood as having the most sophisticated capability of any American adversary.
“This is a traditional intelligence collection effort,” said John Hultquist, the head of cyber espionage at security firm FireEye. “Nations like Russia are keenly interested in understanding what America’s policies will be towards them and their interests [through] insight into internal conversations, strategy roadmaps, meeting calendars, internal memos, [and] internal debates. These things provide a distinct advantage … from understanding how to posture against the candidate to publishing sensitive information in an effort to embarrass or alter perceptions.”
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper last month also noted it was a given the countries were spying on U.S. presidential candidates. “We have already had some indications of [hacking] and a combination of DHS [and] FBI are doing what they can to educate both candidates of potential cyberthreats,” Clapper said.
