How the Russians Hacked the DCCC and DNC

The outstanding timing of the Russian attempt on the servers controlled by Clinton is just a single of the new details exposed in the denunciation of the 12 Russian military intelligence personnel, who according to Mueller, allegedly hacked the computers and email accounts of the Democratic bureaucrats and organizations in a daring effort to influence the United States election (Chang, np).

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Even though the broad outlines of the hacking and influence campaign were reported widely, the indictment expresses for the first time the tactics, identities, and techniques of the operation to interfere with American democracy. It involves information of how the Russians, with the use of an encrypted file with directions, delivered their trove of emails that they hacked to WikiLeaks, which is the online anti-secrecy company controlled by Julian Assange that became the primary podium for the Russians to put on show their trove of hacked emails (Nance, np).

As stated by the indictment, the operation started as early as March 2016, at a point when Lukashev designed and sent a spearphish mail to Podesta, and it was made in a way to resemble a security warning from Google, the indictment (Nance, np). The parody email instructed the user to alter his password by pressing on a link. According to individuals familiar with the instance, Podesta's assistant dutifully complied with the help of directions of the security technician. The mails lacerated from the account of Podesta would then be released on WikiLeaks in stable steam later the same year, ensuring that information that was embarrassing and unhealthy to Clinton's campaign would persistently deflect from her message on a daily basis in the weeks just before the election.

The GRU purportedly broke into the DCCC's networks in April 2016, by convincing an employee. The criminals installed Keystroke loggers, which would allow them to view whatever the employees typed, and took pictures of the computer screens of the employees, as stated by the indictment (Chang, np). The DCCC was used as the hackers' entry to the DNC. The GRU, armed with qualifications of a DCCC contractor certified to get access to the network of DNC, infiltrated the national committee, finally obtaining entree to 33 computers.

Once they gained access of the DNC and DCCC computers, the hackers looked for keywords connected to the 2016 election, prosecutors claimed. The criminals latter searched for terms such as "Cruz," "Trump," and "Hillary" in one of the DCCC computers in Mid-April 2016 (Nance, np). Besides, the indictment stated that they copied certain DCCC folders as well, including a particular one labeled "Benghazi Investigations." Moreover, they targeted computers which had data concerning research on opposition and plan for 2016 election's field operations.

Furthermore, the hackers made use of computer network infrastructure that they chartered in the U.S, including in Illinois and Arizona, to transfer files from the targeted machines. On 22nd June, the indictments illustrated that WikiLeaks sent a private message to Guccifer 2.0 and was asking permission to access material, stating "it will have a much higher impact" on its site (Nance, np). The GRU repeatedly attempted to move the stolen emails from DNC to WikiLeaks starting from late June 2016.

However, on the 14th of July, the Russians received a mail to WikiLeaks having an attachment labeled "wk dnc link1.txt.gpg." the attachment contained an encrypted file with guidelines on accessing an online archive of stolen documents from DNC (Chang, np). On 18th July, WikiLeaks confirmed being in possession of "the 1Gb or so archive" and said it would release the data the same week. According to the indictment, four days later WikiLeaks exposed the DNC email archive carrying over 20, 000 emails as well as other hacked documents by the GRU and this was three days prior to the opening of the Democratic National Convention.

Works Cited

Chang, Alvin. "How Russian Hackers Stole Information From Democrats, In 3 Simple Diagrams". Vox, 2018, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/16/17575940/russian-election-hack-democrats-trump-putin-diagram. Accessed 24 Oct 2018.

Nance, Malcolm. The Plot to Hack America: How Putin's Cyberspies and WikiLeaks Tried to Steal the 2016 Election. Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., 2016.