Hackers ‘left all kinds of fingerprints,’ sources say, but Kremlin accuses American politicians of being ‘paranoid’
Officials in Washington believe that Kremlin operatives carried out the Democratic National Committee email hack, a US official told CBS news Tuesday.
“We don’t have any question about that,” the official said, noting that the perpetrators “left all kinds of fingerprints.”
Another US intelligence official was quoted in the report as saying that the method used in was typical of Russian techniques identified by the government in the past.
“We understand how hack groups use the Internet to attack,” said the official, who was not identified in the report. “The pattern and launch point used before by Russians is similar to the DNC attack.”
The hacked emails, posted by Wikileaks Friday, suggested the Democratic National Committee was favoring Clinton over her primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, despite pledging impartiality. Democratic party chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resignedover the incident after the leaked emails prompted primary runner-up Sanders to call for her to step down.
One of the officials also told CBS that the “DNC was told before the convention that something was going on and they took some time to respond.”
US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday told reporters he had quizzed his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov about the hack when the two met in Laos.
“I raised the question and we will continue to work to see precisely what those facts are,” Kerry said, without revealing how Lavrov had responded.
The FBI is also looking into the email breach, which has sparked speculation to the effect that Russian President Vladimir Putin is seeking to divide the Democratic party in the hope that it will boost his preferred candidate, the Republican Party’s Donald Trump.
Trump told The New York Times last week that he would decide whether to protect America’s NATO allies against Russian aggression based on whether those countries “have fulfilled their obligations to us,” hinting that he might pivot away from the decades-old pact.
Some Republicans opposed to Trump have also sought to cast him as pro-Putin, a position that would put him at odds with both Republican and Democratic foreign policy and also diverge from the current GOP platform adopted at that party’s convention last week.
A Russian presidential spokesman accused US politicians of being “paranoid.”
Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Tuesday that the allegation that Putin orchestrated the hack in order to raise Trump’s chances was just another “paranoid” attempt by American politicians to play what he called “the Russia card” during the campaign.
“We’re still witnessing attempts to use the Russian issue — in a paranoid way — during the US election campaign,” he told reporters. “There’s nothing new here, it’s a sort of traditional pastime of theirs. We think it’s not good for bilateral ties but we realize that we have to go through this unfavorable period.”
As reported by The Times of Israel