Analysis

DNC EMAIL HACK

Russian government hackers are widely believed to be behind the cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee’s email system, which led to the release of 20,000 private emails just before the Democratic National Convention. Trump then invited the Russian cyber-thieves to do even more, to dig into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email server to find supposedly missing emails. In effect, Trump was asking the Russians to become a player in the U.S. presidential election – on his behalf – an invitation that has been widely condemned.

As Foreign Policy Magazine reported, “Trump’s appeal to Russia to spy on the nation’s former chief diplomat is startling and unprecedented, to say the least. He’s appealing to a country now accused of trying to sway a U.S. presidential election in favor of Trump, a candidate of whom Russian strongman Vladimir Putin has spoken highly. Trump has done the same, and has also said some Baltic members of NATO might be on their own if Russia decide to invade.”

Evidence for the Russian hack includes:

• Russian language settings were found within metadata of hacker’s computer.
• Motherboard, an online tech magazine, published an interview with supposedly lone hacker Guccifer 2.0 where the hacker switched from English, to Romanian, to Russian, and then promptly cut his interview off. Motherboard had a linguistics specialist review the interview, finding Guccifer 2.0’s Romanian answers were not that of a native Romanian speaker as well as “the syntax of several of his English lines echoed Russian sentence constructions.”
• Second linguistic analysis provided to New York Times by cybersecurity firm Taia Global confirmed Guccifer 2.0’s Russian identity.

Source: The New York Times