{"id":10032,"date":"2017-11-02T15:05:38","date_gmt":"2017-11-02T15:05:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/federaltimes\/uncategorized\/2017\/11\/02\/russia-hackers-had-targets-worldwide-beyond-us-election\/"},"modified":"2026-08-08T04:31:03","modified_gmt":"2026-08-08T04:31:03","slug":"russia-hackers-had-targets-worldwide-beyond-us-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/one.sightlinemg.com\/federaltimes\/uncategorized\/2017\/11\/02\/russia-hackers-had-targets-worldwide-beyond-us-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia hackers had targets worldwide, beyond US election"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">WASHINGTON \u2014 It wasn\u2019t just Hillary Clinton\u2019s emails they went after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The hackers who disrupted the U.S. presidential election last year had ambitions that stretched across the globe, 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figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that went back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users \u2014 from the pope\u2019s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow. The targets were spread among 116 countries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIt\u2019s a wish list of who you\u2019d want to target to further Russian interests,\u201d said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP\u2019s findings. He said the data was \u201ca master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the <a>revelation<\/a> Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had \u201cdirt\u201d on Clinton, including \u201cthousands of emails.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered \u201cunfounded.\u201d But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThis is the Kremlin and the general staff,\u201d said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI have no doubts.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><b>The new evidence<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Secureworks\u2019 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the United States, which was Russia\u2019s Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The list skewed toward workers for defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and \u2014 especially \u2014 Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton\u2019s inner circle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The AP also found a handful of Republican targets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThey got two years of email,\u201d Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn\u2019t know for sure who was responsible, \u201cI always suspected some Russian connection.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who <a>helped uncover<\/a> the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort \u2014 whose <a>indictment<\/a> was unsealed Monday in Washington.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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\u2019s Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cEverything on this list fits,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin\u2019s radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican\u2019s representative in Kiev; an adult education organization in Kazakhstan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIt\u2019s simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities,\u201d said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. He was also on the list.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cIf you\u2019re not Russia,\u201d he said, \u201chacking these people is a colossal waste of time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><b>Working 9 to 6 Moscow time<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren\u2019t new. But raw data has been hard to come by.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Researchers have been documenting the group\u2019s activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia\u2019s intelligence services. The \u201cFancy Bear\u201d <a>nickname<\/a> is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia\u2019s national symbol.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the wake of the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence agencies <a>publicly endorsed<\/a> the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the U.S. intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That makes the Secureworks\u2019 database a key piece of public evidence \u2014 all the more remarkable because it\u2019s the result of a careless mistake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Secureworks <a>effectively stumbled across it<\/a> when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear\u2019s signature pieces of malicious software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He found a hyperactive Bitly account that Fancy Bear (which Secureworks calls \u201cIron Twilight\u201d) was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google\u2019s spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group\u2019s shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders. The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based <a>Trend Micro<\/a> and the Slovakian firm <a>ESET<\/a> .<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95 percent of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours \u2014 between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday to Friday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The AP\u2019s findings also track with <a>a report<\/a> that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Secureworks\u2019 roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers\u2019 emails in early April 2016 \u2014 exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWe have no doubts about who is behind these attacks,\u201d said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny\u2019s Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. \u201cI am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><b>The myth of the 400-pound man<\/b><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even if only a small fraction of the 4,700 Gmail accounts targeted by Fancy Bear were hacked successfully, the data drawn from them could run into terabytes \u2014 easily rivaling the biggest known leaks in journalistic history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For the hackers to have made sense of that mountain of messages \u2014 in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Arabic and many other languages \u2014 they would have needed a substantial team of analysts and translators. Merely identifying and sorting the targets took six AP reporters eight weeks of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The AP\u2019s effort offers \u201ca little feel for how much labor went into this,\u201d said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University\u2019s School of Advanced International Studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In response to the AP\u2019s investigation, the DNC issued a statement saying the evidence that Russia had interfered in the election was \u201cirrefutable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Rid said the investigation should put to rest any theories like the one then-candidate Donald Trump floated <a>last year<\/a> that the hacks could be the work of \u201csomeone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe notion that it\u2019s just a lone hacker somewhere is utterly absurd,\u201d Rid said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><i>For a look at some of the high-profile phishing attempts, read <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fifthdomain.com\/civilian\/2017\/11\/02\/the-hackers-hit-list\/\">The hackers\u2019 hit list: 6 prime targets<\/a>. <\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><i>Donn reported from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Myers reported from Chicago. Chad Day, Desmond Butler and Ted Bridis in Washington, Frank Bajak in Houston, Lori Hinnant in Paris, Maggie Michael in Cairo and Erika Kinetz in Shanghai contributed to this report. Novaya Gazeta reporters Nikolay Voroshilov, Yana Surinskaya and Roman Anin in Moscow also contributed.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is detailed forensic evidence pointing to 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, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":30283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"9":{"categories":["home","daily-brief","newsletters"],"primary_category":"home"}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[5420],"class_list":["post-10032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"QMQOBWIGMVAWFO3XX33U6ZYJVY","arc_canonical_url":"\/civilian\/2017\/11\/02\/russia-hackers-had-targets-worldwide-beyond-us-election\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.0 (Yoast SEO v28.1) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Russia hackers had targets worldwide, beyond US election - Federal Times<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"There is detailed forensic evidence pointing to 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, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"noindex, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Russia hackers had targets worldwide, beyond US election\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" 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