US Agencies Point Finger at Top Russian Officials for Political Cyberattacks
Cyber attacks against the Democratic National Committee were undertaken by Russian hackers working for top officials in the Russian government, American intelligence agencies said Friday.
“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 the statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” the statement said.
The statement was vague about the reason for Russia’s cyber attacks.
“These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process,” the statement said. “Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there.”
The joint statement said that despite success in embarrassing the DNC, hackers would be unable to compromise America’s election system.
The statement did note that several states have detected attempts to hack into their election systems, and that servers operated by a Russian company were connected to the attempts.
“However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government,” the statement said.
The statement also sought to assure voters of the integrity of the election system.
“This assessment is based on the decentralized nature of our election system in this country and the number of protections state and local election officials have in place. States ensure that voting machines are not connected to the Internet, and there are numerous checks and balances as well as extensive oversight at multiple levels built into our election process,” the statement said.
Putin has denied any connection to the DNC hack, which caused a political embarrassment by revealing the extent to which the DNC worked to support Hillary Clinton’s campaign at the expense of rival Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?’’ Putin said in early September. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public.’’
“There’s no need to distract the public’s attention from the essence of the problem by raising some minor issues connected with the search for who did it,” Putin said. “But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.” (For more from the author of “US Agencies Point Finger at Top Russian Officials for Political Cyberattacks” please click HERE)
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