U.S. government officially accuses Russia of hacking campaign to interfere with elections

The Obama administration on Friday officially accused Russia of attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections, including by hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations.

The denunciation, made by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, came as pressure was growing from within the administration and some lawmakers to publicly name Moscow and hold it accountable for actions apparently aimed at sowing discord around the election.

“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” said a joint statement from the two agencies. “. . . These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.”

The public finger-pointing was welcomed by senior Democratic and Republican lawmakers, who also said they now expect the administration to move to punish the Kremlin as part of an effort to deter further acts by its hackers.

“Today was just the first step,” said Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), a member of the Homeland Security Committee. “Russia must face serious consequences. Moscow orchestrated these hacks because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin believes Soviet-style aggression is worth it. The United States must upend Putin’s calculus with a strong diplomatic, political, ­cyber and economic response.”

The White House has been mulling potential responses, such as economic sanctions, but no formal recommendation to the president has been made.

The DNC publicly disclosed the intrusions in June, saying its investigation determined that Russian government hackers were behind the breach. That was followed shortly after by a major leak of DNC emails, some so embarrassing that they forced the resignation of the DNC chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Fla.), on the eve of the Democratic National Convention.

The administration also blamed Moscow for the hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the subsequent leak of private email addresses and cellphone numbers of Democratic lawmakers.

Other leaks of hacked material followed.

The digitally purloined material has appeared on websites such as DC Leaks and WikiLeaks. It has included the private emails of former secretary of state Colin Powell and aides to former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

An online persona calling himself Guccifer 2.0 has claimed responsibility for posting the material. Those sites and that persona are “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” the joint statement said. “. . . We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”

The Kremlin on Friday dismissed the administration’s accusation.

“This is some sort of nonsense,” said Dmitry Peskov, press secretary for Putin. “Every day, Putin’s site gets attacked by tens of thousands of hackers. Many of these attacks can be traced to U.S. territory. It’s not as though we accuse the White House or Langley of doing it each time it happens.”

Hours after the administration called out Russia, WikiLeaks released some 2,000 emails apparently hacked from the personal Gmail inbox of Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta. They included excerpts of speeches Clinton made to Wall Street banks that she had resisted making public. In one of them, she said that Wall Street knew best how it should be regulated. The campaign has not acknowledged the excerpts’ authenticity. There was no immediate word from the FBI as to whether the Russians were behind this release.

The Obama administration noted that attempts to interfere in other countries’ political processes are not new to Moscow. Russian hackers have used hacking and other techniques to influence public opinion in Europe and Eurasia, it noted. On the eve of a critical post-revolution presidential vote in Ukraine in 2014, for instance, a digital assault nearly crippled the website of the country’s central election commission.

The intelligence community has for weeks been confident that hackers tied to Russian spy agencies were behind the DNC hack. Senior officials at the Justice Department and DHS pressed the White House to go public with an accusation.

But a number of administration officials were worried that such a statement would appear to politicize the issue in the weeks before the election. They were also concerned about the Kremlin’s reaction and about inadvertently disclosing sensitive intelligence sources and methods.

“Is it in our interest to act?” Lisa O. Monaco, Obama’s adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, said at a Washington Post cybersecurity summit Thursday. “The primary guiding and overarching focus in these discussions is: What is in the national security interest of the United States? That’s the North Star for those discussions.”

Senior administration officials in recent weeks had begun to hint that a public attribution might be coming.

“We know Russia is a bad actor in cyberspace, just as China has been, just as Iran has been,” ­Monaco said at a cybersecurity conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last month. “Nobody should think that there is a free pass when you’re conducting malicious cyber-activity.”

Assistant Attorney General John Carlin said at the same event that the message to countries, such as Russia, that attempt to meddle in the U.S. election is, “You can and will be held accountable.”

With the public naming of Moscow, the administration has now officially called out all its major nation-state foes in cyberspace: China, Iran, North Korea and Russia. But among the four, Russia is the only government that has not been subject to a deterrent measure.

The administration has a range of options, including economic sanctions for malicious cyber-activity, a new tool created by the president that has yet to be used. The Justice Department could bring indictments for hacking. The National Security Agency could take a covert action in cyberspace to send a signal to the Kremlin. Or the State Department can decide to eject Russian diplomats.

Jason Healey, a senior research scholar on cyber-issues at Columbia University, said the Pentagon’s Cyber Command should disrupt Russian hacking operations. “Go after their command and control,” he said. “ ‘Counteroffensive’ is the key word here.”

Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, urged the administration to work with European allies to develop a “concerted” response, whether it involves economic sanctions or other measures.

“The best way to push back,” Schiff said, “is in a truly international effort to let the Russians know there will be costs to this latest form of cyber-aggression against others.”

David Filipov contributed to this report.

Read More >>

Read More

FBI Suspects Russia Hacked DNC; U.S. Officials Say It Was to Elect Donald Trump

Did the Russian government hack the DNC to bring down Hillary Clinton? That’s the view that’s quickly emerging inside American intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

The FBI suspects that Russian government hackers breached the networks of the Democratic National Committee and stole emails that were posted to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks on Friday. It’s an operation that several U.S. officials now suspect was a deliberate attempt to influence the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump, according to five individuals familiar with the investigation of the breach.

The theory that Moscow orchestrated the leaks to help Trump, who has repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin and practically called for the end of NATO, is fast gaining currency within the Obama administration because of the timing of the leaks and Trump’s own connections to the Russian government, the sources said on condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing and developing quickly.

About 20,000 internal DNC emails were disclosed just days before the beginning of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and several showed an effort by staffers to undermine Bernie Sanders’s campaign against Hillary Clinton. One email even discussed challenging Sanders’s religious faith. In response to the embarrassing revelations, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced she would step down after the convention.

Current and former U.S. officials drew analogies to so-called “active measures campaigns,” or state-sponsored operations designed for political effects.

“The release of emails just as the Democratic National Convention is getting underway this week has the hallmarks of a Russian active measures campaign,” David Shedd, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told The Daily Beast. Shedd said that additional leaks were likely, echoing an opinion expressed by U.S. officials and experts who said that the release of emails on Friday may just be an opening salvo.

Officials also noted Trump’s own connections to the Russian government. Putin has publicly praised the nominee, who said he was “honored” by the compliment. Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was a consultant for Viktor Yanukovych, the former president of Ukraine who was ousted for his pro-Moscow orientation (and now lives in Russia). One of Trump’s top national security advisers, retired Army Gen. Michael Flynn, sat with Putin at a dinner celebrating the 10th anniversary of Kremlin-backed media network RT and was paid to give a speech at the event; Flynn later retweeted an anti-Semitic message that called into question any Kremlin-Trump link. Another Trump adviser, Carter Page, recently denounced America’s “often-hypocritical focus on democratization” while in Moscow. And last week, Trump said that he might not come to the aid of U.S. NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression unless they paid what he thinks they owe for Europe’s common defense.

Officials also thought it was telling that the emails were given to WikiLeaks, which is perceived as being hostile to the U.S. government. “This wasn’t surprising to us,” said one U.S. official familiar with the investigation.

An FBI spokesperson said in a statement Monday that the bureau was investigating the breach but declined to comment on whether political motivation was part of the inquiry. “A compromise of this nature is something we take very seriously, and the FBI will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace,” the spokesperson said.

“I’m sure they will consider potential motives,” White House Spokesperson Josh Earnest told reporters on Monday.


Two U.S. officials told The Daily Beast that while hacking is a crime, and therefore falls under the FBI’s jurisdiction, trying to manipulate an election is not. That may limit what the FBI can investigate, the officials said said.

“Manipulation is not a crime. Some would argue that Voice of America or Fox News try to manipulate elections,” one retired FBI agent told The Daily Beast.

That doesn’t mean the FBI has to remain silent if it finds evidence of Russia’s meddling. Should the bureau release a statement after an investigation tying the Russians to the hack and subsequent release to Wikileaks, that would essentially be a public indictment, the officials said.

It also may be possible for the FBI to investigate the question of intent, including whether the email leak is an instance of an unregistered foreign agent illegally trying to influence the U.S. political system, another U.S. official said. But it’s easier for the FBI to investigate the breach and theft of information itself, which are clearly prohibited under U.S. law, the official added.

The FBI first notified the DNC in April that it had been breached, said two individuals who are familiar with the matter. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials had been aware of two Russian hacker groups that have been linked to the intrusion and are also believed to have compromised networks in U.S. government agencies, including the Defense Department, the State Department, and the White House, as well as U.S. companies and universities.

The DNC hired a computer security firm, CrowdStrike, to investigate the breach. It has publicly attributed the operation to two known hacker groups connected to the Russian government that it dubs Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.

The two groups, which compete with one another, got into the DNC networks last summer and this April, respectively, CrowdStrike told The Washington Post, which first reported the breaches last month.

Another cybersecurity firm, ThreatConnect, independently assessed the breach and concluded that the DNC operation was consistent with the hackers’ previous efforts to gather information on U.S. officials and operations.

The theft of information, which at the time reportedly consisted of opposition research and the DNC’s files on Trump, seemed to be part of a longer campaign of spying by the Russians in order to glean insights into the next president. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper also said in May that there were indications both presidential campaigns had been targeted by foreign hackers.

But the provision of the DNC emails to WikiLeaks added a new dimension to the intrusion. (The group has pushed back against the idea that Russia supplied the emails.)

“If there is a concerted effort to undermine the campaign of the Democratic Party nominee, we can and should expect additional embarrassing emails to be released by Wikileaks, including from candidate Hillary Clinton’s personal server,” Shedd, the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief, said.

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said lawmakers had been briefed on the intrusion and “will continue to seek further information from the [intelligence community] as to the origin of any attack and a potential connection to Russia or another state sponsor.”

"If the hack is linked to Russian actors, it would not be the first time cyber intrusions linked to the Kremlin and its supporters have sought to influence the political process in other countries,” Rep. Adam Schiff said in a statement. “Given Donald Trump’s well known admiration for Putin and his belittling of NATO, the Russians have both the means and the motive to engage in a hack of the DNC and the dump of its emails prior to the Democratic Convention. That foreign actors may be trying to influence our election—let alone a powerful adversary like Russia—should concern all Americans of any party."

Within the email dump itself, there were further indications of foreign meddling in the campaign.


On May 4, DNC opposition researcher Alexandra Chalupa told a colleague that ever since she began collecting information on Trump campaign director Paul Manafort, she had been receiving daily security warnings from Yahoo that her personal account may have “been the target of state-sponsored actors.” Such notifications are routine when an internet or email provider suspects that a user may have been hacked or is likely to be hacked.

Chalupa told DNC communications director Luis Miranda in an email that she continued to get the warnings from Yahoo “despite changing my password often.”

A few days prior to that message, a DNC staffer notified colleagues that the committee’s rapid-response blog, Factivists, had been “compromised.”

“We have been compromised! But it's all ok,” Rachel Palermo said in a brief message to an unspecified number of recipients. Palermo said that to “prevent future issues,” the password to the blog would be changed “every few weeks. She also included a new password in the email, which the intruders may well have seen.

And in mid-May, two DNC staffers communicating about a donor said that her email account had been hacked and was no longer working. The donor was identified only as Agnes. Agnes Gund is a prominent philanthropist and Democratic donor. DNC officials told The Washington Post that their donor files weren’t accessed. It’s not clear if the donor’s email was hacked by the same Russian groups.

Attributing the source of a breach to a specific actor is difficult, but CrowdStrike, which has close ties to the FBI and U.S. intelligence community, provided some details on its findings in a recent blog post. The company based its attributions on characteristic tools and techniques that that it has attributed to the hacker group in previous intrusions.

Cozy Bear prefers “a broadly targeted spearphish campaign,” or using emails that appear to come from a trusted sender but that actually include web links that will insert malicious software code onto a victim’s machine, CrowdStrike reported. The code uses sophisticated tools to remotely access the computer, as well as encryption to cover their tracks, both of which indicate “a well-resourced adversary.”

Fancy Bear likewise has developed a suite of hacking tools and techniques and has been linked to intrusions on U.S. government systems, CrowdStrike said. The group tends to favor establishing websites “that spoof the look and feel of the victim’s web-based email services in order to steal their credentials.”

It’s not clear precisely how the groups penetrated the DNC’s networks. But CrowdStrike said its analysts “immediately” recognized the hackers’ signatures. Separately, another computer security firm, ThreatConnect, has corroborated the findings and also found that a hacker group going by the moniker Guccifer2, which claims to have provided the emails to WikiLeaks, is likely a Russian-goverment operation.

Any FBI investigation likely would not be released until after the election, and any could be read as sending a political message. Should Trump win, for example, and the FBI announces it found a Russian connection to the hack, some might argue that the FBI is trying to taint Trump’s victory. That would also come on the heels of the FBI’s decision to not charge Clinton with having classified email on her private email server, a decision that outraged many Republicans.

A public finding that the Russians interfered would also exacerbate already tense negotiations between the U.S. and Russia over an agreement to share intelligence and better coordinate strikes in Syria. The increased cooperation has divided much of the U.S. government, some of whom do not see the Russians as trustworthy.
Read More >>

Read More

Russia 'DELIBERATELY bombed secret military base in Syria used by elite American and British forces

Hours after the attack, the Daily Beast says that the US Central Command - which overseas American combat in the Middle East - spoke directly to the pilots.

Officials from Washington and Moscow also spoke over a hotline set up to avoid similar confrontations, reports suggest. 

There was also a similar attack on a CIA-linked site on July 12 that was previously unreported.

But the attack pushed both the US and UK into a compromise with Russia.

The U.S. and Russia agreed to a pact last week to target airstrikes against the Al Qaeda affiliate in the region – Nusra Front.

They reportedly went ahead with the plan despite objections from the Pentagon and CIA.

Daily Mail Online has contacted both the State Department and Ministry of Defence for comment.

US officials and rebel commanders told the Journal that the outpost was hit with cluster munitions.

US attempts to wave off the Russians failed to prevent a second air strike on the base, the report said.

About three weeks later, on July 12, Russian warplanes hit a rebel camp used by family members of CIA-backed fighters about 50 miles west of At-Tanf, the report said.


But the White House and the State Department, seeking to avoid a military escalation, decided to pursue a compromise, it said.

Last week, US Secretary of State John Kerry reached a provisional agreement with the Russians to join forces in strikes on Al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

Under the agreement, the Russians would halt air strikes against US-backed rebels and restrain the Syrian air force in return for Washington easing Moscow's international isolation, the Journal said.

There are still disputes over the areas Russia can strike without approval from the US.

Because of skepticism in the Pentagon, there are reports of a clause in the Russia-US deal that means Kerry can stop cooperating if Putin bombs American allies.

Read More >>

Read More

Cop Stages Own Murder After Stealing from Kids Program to Pay for Porn, Mortgage Payments

Illinois police Wednesday confirmed that one of its officers executed "a carefully staged suicide" which triggered an extensive manhunt for suspects that did not exist, after the cop became nervous about an audit he believed would expose his years-long embezzlement of public funds.

At a press conference Wednesday, authorities revealed that Lieutenant Charles Joseph Gliniewicz's had committed suicide in September, but staged it to look like he had been killed in the line of duty.

"Gliniewicz committed the ultimate betrayal to the citizens he served and the entire law enforcement community," said Lake County Major Crimes Task Force commander George Filenko. "The facts of his actions prove he behaved for years in a manner completely contrary to the image he portrayed."

The revelations Wednesday morning came at the end of a two-month probe, which found that over a seven-year period, Gliniewicz, 52, had stolen thousands of dollars from the Fox Lake Police Explorer program, a youth program that the officer oversaw. He then used the money for personal purchases, including on adult websites, travel, mortgage payments, gym memberships, and cash withdrawals, police said.

Related: This Black American Wants Refugee Status in Canada Because of Police Brutality

Filenko did not specify the exact amount stolen, but said that it was in the "five figures." He added that the evidence also "strongly indicates" at least two other people were involved, but declined from further comment, citing an ongoing investigation.

Shortly before the shooting suicide on September 1, Gliniewicz became concerned about a village of Fox Lake internal audit of inventory that would have potentially exposed his criminal activities, Filenko said.

"We have determined this staged suicide was the end result of extensive criminal acts that Gliniewicz had been committing – in fact he was under increasing levels of personal stress from scrutiny of his management of the Fox Lake Police Explorer program," Filenko said.

The morning of his death, the officer, who was a 30-year Fox Lake police veteran, made a radio call to dispatchers to say that he was chasing three male suspects on foot, according to police. Gliniewicz, who was experienced in setting up mock crime scenes, left a staged trail of police equipment, including pepper spray, a baton and his glasses, to mislead investigators and emergency workers into believing there had been a homicide, Filenko said. The officer then shot himself twice in the chest. He was found at the scene and later died from his injuries.

Related: Video Shows NYPD Officer Tackling, Choking, and Pepper-spraying a Skateboarder

The shooting drew hundreds of local, state and federal officers to search around Fox Lake, about 60 miles north of Chicago and near the Wisconsin border. The Federal Aviation Administration also ordered a no-fly zone over the search area.

Around Fox Lake, a village of around 10,000 people, Gliniewicz was known as "GI Joe" because he had served in the military. At the officer's vigil, where his wife and sons were also present, colleagues called him a "fallen hero."

On Wednesday Filenko said the embarrassment felt personal.

"This is my first time as a law enforcement officer, in my career, that I felt ashamed by the acts of another police officer," he said.

Read More >>

Read More

Ashton Carter: U.S. to Begin 'Direct Action on the Ground' in Iraq, Syria

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said Tuesday that the U.S. will begin "direct action on the ground" against ISIS forces in Iraq and Syria.

"We won't hold back from supporting capable partners in opportunistic attacks against ISIL, or conducting such missions directly whether by strikes from the air or direct action on the ground," Carter said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services committee, using an alternative name for the militant group.

Carter pointed to last week's rescue operation with Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to free hostages held by ISIS.

Carter and Pentagon officials initially refused to characterize the rescue operation as U.S. boots on the ground. However, Carter said last week that the military expects "more raids of this kind" and that the rescue mission "represents a continuation of our advise and assist mission."

This may mean some American soldiers "will be in harm's way, no question about it," Carter said last week.

After months of denying that U.S. troops would be in any combat role in Iraq, Carter late last week in a response to a question posed by NBC News, also acknowledged that the situation U.S. soldiers found themselves in during the raid in Hawija was combat.

"This is combat and things are complicated," Carter said.

During Tuesday's Senate hearing, Carter said Wheeler "was killed in combat."

A feisty Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said on Tuesday that the U.S. effort in Syria is a "half-assed strategy at best," and said that the U.S. is not doing a "damn thing" to bring down Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime.

Carter on Tuesday pushed back against that notion.

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that the "balance of forces" has tilted in Assad's favor.
Read More >>

Read More

NASA to Los Angeles: Get ready for 5.0 quake

((NEWSER) – NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is out with a study predicting that Los Angeles has a 99.9% chance of experiencing an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.0 or greater within the next two and a half years.

"There’s enough energy stored to produce about a magnitude 6.1 to 6.3 earthquake" with an epicenter in La Habra, which was hit by a quake in 2014, says a JPL geophysicist, per CBS LA. Earthquake scientists used information from the La Habra quake to make their predictions, and found that there's a 35% chance of an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.0 or greater, the Los Angeles Daily News reports.

But other experts aren't convinced; KPCC goes so far as to call the JPL study "controversial."

As the US Geological Survey notes, "the accepted random chance of a (magnitude 5.0) or greater in this area in three years is 85%, independent of the analysis in this paper." Plus, JPL's research "has not yet been examined by the long-established committees that evaluate earthquake forecasts and predictions made by scientists," the USGS says, per LA Weekly. "The lack of details on the method of analysis makes a critical assessment of this approach very difficult."

And, as one Caltech seismologist who read the study notes, "As far as I’m concerned there has never been a successful earthquake prediction, and a scientific breakthrough would be required for us to make a scientifically based prediction." But, he adds, since earthquakes tend to cluster, it's not much of a stretch to assume there will be another one in La Habra. (Only a single survivor remains from another California earthquake.)

Read More >>

Read More