It's [cyber] war: U.S. officially blames Russia for recent hacks
The U.S. accused Russia of trying to hack American political organizations and state election systems in an announcement on Friday.
The announcement marks the latest news of Russian actors attempting to tamper with the U.S. electoral process, which has been something of a recurring news story for several months.
"The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations," officials with the office of the Director of National Intelligence wrote in an afternoon press release.
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"The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process," the release continued.
"Some states" have observed "scanning and probing of their election-related systems," and efforts to trace that activity have pointed back to a Russian company, though the U.S. isn't blaming the Russian government for that just yet.
The USIC and the Department of Homeland Security believe it would be difficult for someone, even a nation-state actor, to alter ballot counts or election results by cyberattack, the statement adds.
It was not immediately clear what kind of success the hacks might have had. U.S. voter registration systems are not organized with a central system.
It is possible to hack into the disparate voter registration systems, some of which may be connected to the internet. The actual vote collection and tabulation systems, however, are not actually hackable in the way a computer is.
“[There are] no individual systems for them to hack," Kimball Brace, founder and president of Election Data Services, told Mashable in a previous interview. "Devices are in secured, locked down areas and not exposed to the internet."
That, however, has not stopped hackers from trying to tamper with other systems. We revisited recent Russian hacking attempts, below.
Cozy Bear
A Russian government hacking group called "Cozy Bear" broke into the computers of the Democratic National Committee last Summer, though the public only found out via an article in The Washington Post in June.
The DNC called cyber firm CrowdStrike after it noticed strange activity within its computer systems, and from there the firm was able to detect two groups of hackers, each attacked to a different Russian intelligence group.
CrowdStrike couldn't quite pinpoint the agency behind Cozy Bear, but said it might have been the Federal Security Service, a Russian security agency once led by current Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The firm also couldn't say for sure how they accessed DNC employee computers, but the hacking group was able to look in on employee emails and other communications.
Fancy Bear
The other group, dubbed "Fancy Bear," is likely a hacking arm of Russia's military intelligence agency, according to the Washington Post article.
DNC employees noticed something was off after this group broke into committee computers in April.
They accessed opposition research files on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump by breaking into the computers of folks assigned to dig into the nominee's past.
The public release of information that resulted from these hacks wound up costing former DNC Chairperson Debbie Wasserman Schultz her job. She resigned after hacked emails showed DNC officials openly preferred the election of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee over runner-up Bernie Sanders.
DCCC hack
One month after the world found out about the DNC hacks, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which helps run campaigns of House Democrats, announced that it, too, had been hacked.
Though they didn't reveal much information about the hack at the time, officials said the event was "similar to other recent incidents,” and it didn't take long to connect the dots from one suspected Russian hacking to another.
A hacker or more likely a hacking group known as Guccifer 2.0 -- likely a Russian government operation -- recently dumped documents online that appear to have come from the DCCC hack.
Topics Cybersecurity
Tim Chester was Senior Editor, Real Time News in Los Angeles. Before that he was Deputy Editor of Mashable UK in London. Prior to joining Mashable, Tim was a Senior Web Editor at Penguin Random House, helping to relaunch the Rough Guides website and other travel brands. He was also a writer for Buzzfeed, GQ and The Sunday Times, covering everything from culture to tech and current affairs. Before that, he was Deputy Editor at NME.COM, overseeing content and development on the London-based music and entertainment site. Tim loves music and travel and has combined these two passions at festivals from Iceland to Malawi and beyond.
