The US Justice Department on Friday filed criminal indictments that accuse 12 Russian intelligence officers of carrying out the 2016 hacks on the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of Hillary Clinton. The officers—one of whom operated under the persona of Guccifer 2.0—then dispersed sensitive communications in an attempt to influence the results of the 2016 election, prosecutors alleged.
The indictments were filed by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, who is investigating possible collusion between the presidential campaign of President Donald Trump and the Russian spies US intelligence agencies say interfered with the 2016 election. So far, Mueller’s team has indicted 32 people, including members of a Russian company that blanketed social media with fake news stories and senior members of the Trump campaign. Friday’s indictments were disclosed by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a press conference in Washington, DC."The objective of the conspiracy was to hack into the computers of US persons and entities involved in the 2016 US presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage release of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 US presidential election," prosecutors wrote in the 29-page indictment. The 12 Russians also allegedly breached computers at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a state board of elections, and a maker of software used to verify voter registration information. Friday’s indictments come ahead of next week’s scheduled meeting between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The documents said that Mueller’s team has determined that a person who calls himself Guccifer 2.0 and leaked sensitive DNC documents in the months leading up to the 2016 election is a Russian intelligence officer. Guccifer 2.0 had insisted that he was a Romanian who hacked the DNC independently with no involvement from Russia. Russia has also denied any connection to the breach. Prosecutors said they were able to establish that Guccifer 2.0 was really a Russian agent when one of the individuals maintaining Guccifer 2.0's online presence forgot to use a virtual private network when accessing a US-based social media platform. Instead, the person left an Internet Protocol address located in Moscow in the service's logs.
"To hide their connections to Russia and the Russian government, the Conspirators used false identities and made false statements about their identities," the indictment stated. "To further avoid detection, the conspirators used a network of computers located across the world, including in the United States, and paid for this infrastructure using cryptocurrency."
One of the 12 individuals charged allegedly hacked into an unnamed state's board of elections and stole information related to approximately 500,000 voters. The same individual, prosecutors said, also broke into computers belonging to an unnamed supplier of software for verifying voter registration information for the 2016 elections. Some of the same infrastructure the defendant allegedly used to hack the software maker was used to breach the state board of elections.
reader comments
406