WASHINGTON (AP) — The hackers who disrupted the U.S. presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.
The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe — from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow.
“It’s a wish list of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.”
The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets.
Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet. The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered “unfounded.” But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that.
“This is the Kremlin and the general staff,” said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data.
“I have no doubts.”
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THE NEW EVIDENCE
Secureworks’ list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria.
In the United States, which was Russia’s Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country’s diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark.
The list skewed toward workers for defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton’s inner circle.
The AP also found a handful of Republican targets.
Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks.
“They got two years of email,” Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn’t know for sure who was responsible, “I always suspected some Russian connection.”
In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers.
The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington.
In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists. Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants.
“Everything on this list fits,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following.
Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin’s radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican’s representative in Kiev; an adult education organization in Kazakhstan.
“It’s simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. He was also on the list.
“If you’re not Russia,” he said, “hacking these people is a colossal waste of time.”
<< This is my surprised face. Cue Trumpist victim-blaming in 3… 2… 1…
And in a related story…this is also big. David Corn has unearthed some interesting new information not seen anywhere else regarding Russian hacking into the trump organization. This hacking goes back 4 years, where the Russians used malware and created subdomains to all of trump’s main domain accounts, thereby having access to all communications from their IP addresses. What’s fascinating is that this was just discovered recently and trump and co. had no clue this was happening.
So kudos to him.
"Hey, Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you found all of TRump’s emails that are now missing. I think you will probably be surprised by the interest in them mightily by our press.”
Putin’s party, Unity *(then United Russia) has been developing vote-leveraging techniques since the start of the millennium. The Hungarian election in 2014 probably marked the entry to this new arrangement. Then there was Brexit, the US presidential, the French election, etc. A consistent theme beyond, mooslims, immigration and Brussels/Washington swamp cleaning, is oligarch friendliness. Anne Applebaum should get some credit for calling this aspect of Trump out early on. If your country does not have a monarchy, you need this to have the magic work.
Thank for the link. Does look big.
I had just read the whole AP story (what is posted here is about the first half) - it is worth reading the whole thing - as the second half gives an idea of how many resources must have been devoted to the effort. It is far more vast than realized. Scroll down to the heading “Working 9 to 6 Moscow Time” for the additional parts of the story.
You can tell which party is truly strong on defense by seeing who your enemy is fighting.
Defense spending under Republicans is just a misnomer for welfare and corrupt cronyism. For Republicans, it isn’t defense at all. It’s perpetual offense to keep the money and political favors flowing.
What is the exit strategy for the Middle East wars? When do Republicans plan to protect our country against Russian cyber attacks?