Was It a 400-Pound, 14-Year-Old Hacker, or Russia? Here’s Some of the Evidence
In recent weeks, President-elect Donald J. Trump has taken to Twitter to cast doubt over a United States joint intelligence assessment that Russian intelligence services are responsible for hacking into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the email account of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
Julian Assange said “a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta” - why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2017
The United States intelligence community may be relying on classified information that it does not want to reveal in order to avoid alerting the hackers to its sources — we’ll find out more next week when an unclassified report on the political hacking is released.
But what if you’d rather not take the government’s word for it? Reports released last summer by information security companies provide some publicly available evidence about the source of the attacks.
Phishing for Podesta
During the month leading up to the United States presidential election, WikiLeaks published daily releases of thousands of emails from Mr. Podesta’s Google account. One of the emails published by WikiLeaks in late October is a “spear phishing” email that could have been used by hackers to learn the password for Mr. Podesta’s email account.
Spear phishing is a term used to describe a type of hack that often uses an official-looking email that includes personal information like a name or photograph and appears to be sent by a person or business with whom the target is familiar. The email contains an attachment that it asks the target to download, or a link to be clicked.
More at NY Times: Was It a 400-Pound, 14-Year-Old Hacker, or Russia? Here’s Some of the Evidence