ERIC LICHTBLAU and NOAH WEILANDAUG
New York Times, August 13, 2016
WASHINGTON — A hacker believed to be tied to the Russian intelligence services made public another set of internal Democratic Party documents on Friday, including the personal cellphone numbers and email addresses of nearly 200 lawmakers.
The files appeared to be less politically embarrassing and damaging than the hacker’s initial trove, which came from the Democratic National Committee. Those documents, released by WikiLeaks last month on the eve of the party’s convention, led to the resignation of the committee’s leader, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
But the emergence of another set of leaked documents threatened to intensify international tensions over Russia’s suspected meddling in United States politics.
The hacker claiming responsibility for the breach — working under the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0, which American intelligence officials believe is an alias for a Russian intelligence hacker — appeared eager to taunt Democrats in releasing the latest files. Those documents came from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the fund-raising arm for House Democrats.
“It’s time for new revelations now,” the hacker wrote in posting the files. “All of you may have heard about the DCCC hack. As you see I wasn’t wasting my time! It was even easier than in the case of the DNC breach.”
On Friday night, the hacker indicated that more leaks would follow, writing on Twitter that “the major trove” of the House committee documents would be sent to WikiLeaks. “Keep following,” the hacker wrote.
While it became known last month that the House committee had been hacked along with the D.N.C., this was the first time its files had become public.
In a statement, the House committee said it was investigating the authenticity of the documents and was working with federal law enforcement officials. The F.B.I. is leading the investigation.
American intelligence officials said they are virtually certain that Russian intelligence officials were behind the attack. They said that the breach appears to have extended beyond the two Democratic groups to include the personal email accounts of at least 100 Democratic officials.
Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House subcommittee on the National Security Agency and cybersecurity, said he was not overly concerned that his personal information was released.
“If it’s simply my email being sent around, half my constituents have my email,” he said. “If it were to turn out that someone was hacking into emails, it would be a different situation. Worse comes to worst I can get a different email or cell number.”
Mr. Himes dismissed the idea that the leak could affect his, or anyone else’s, election campaign this year.
“It’s hard for me to imagine how just having a bunch of numbers, cellphones and emails would in any way affect the election,” he said. “It wasn’t totally unexpected.”
He added that the cybersecurity subcommittee was likely to discuss the hack in more detail, saying the release of personal information made the threat “feel that much more real” to members.
“If there were the ability for someone to hack into those accounts, that really gets worrisome,” he said. “Someone could cause a lot of damage if they were able to send emails out from a member’s account, but I’m not hearing that that’s a risk at this point.”
The D.N.C. documents that were released last month proved intensely embarrassing for committee officials because they contained emails indicating that party leaders favored Hillary Clinton as their nominee over her rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
The committee’s interim leader, Donna Brazile, created a special cybersecurity panel this week to guard against future attacks.
Much of the latest batch of documents from the House fund-raising committee, including overviews of particular races and campaigns, appeared largely innocuous in comparison to the D.N.C. breach. Beyond the cellphone numbers and email addresses for Democratic lawmakers, the latest release also included passwords for some internal databases.
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign files do not appear to have been directly breached in the cyberattack, but the personal accounts of some campaign officials might have been, and a voting analytics program used by the campaign was opened as part of the D.N.C. breach, officials say.
The American authorities remain uncertain whether the electronic break-in to the Democrats’ computer systems was intended as fairly routine cyberespionage or as part of an effort to manipulate the presidential election.
The Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump, urged the Russians last month to try to find 33,000 “missing” emails from Mrs. Clinton’s personal server. But after his remark produced an intense backlash, Mr. Trump said later that he was being sarcastic.
No comments:
Post a Comment