{"id":61193,"date":"2018-03-23T04:59:30","date_gmt":"2018-03-23T04:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=61193"},"modified":"2018-03-23T04:59:30","modified_gmt":"2018-03-23T04:59:30","slug":"exclusive-lone-dnc-hacker-guccifer-2-0-slipped-up-and-revealed-he-was-a-russian-intelligence-officer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/exclusive-lone-dnc-hacker-guccifer-2-0-slipped-up-and-revealed-he-was-a-russian-intelligence-officer.html","title":{"rendered":"EXCLUSIVE: Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer"},"content":{"rendered":"

EXCLUSIVE: Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Guccifer 2.0, the \u201clone hacker\u201d who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia\u2019s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It\u2019s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.<\/span><\/p>\n

That forensic determination has substantial implications for the criminal probe into potential collusion between President Donald Trump and Russia. The Daily Beast has learned that the special counsel in that investigation, Robert Mueller, has taken over the probe into Guccifer and brought the FBI agents who worked to track the persona onto his team.<\/span><\/p>\n

While it\u2019s unclear what Mueller plans to do with Guccifer, his last round of indictments charged 13 Russians tied to the Internet Research Agency troll farm with a conspiracy \u201cfor the purpose of interfering with the U.S. political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.\u201d It was Mueller\u2019s first move establishing Russian interference in the election within a criminal context, but it stopped short of directly implicating the Putin regime.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mueller\u2019s office declined to comment for this story. But the attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia\u2019s largest foreign intelligence agency would cross the Kremlin threshold\u2014and move the investigation closer to Trump himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe attribution of Guccifer 2.0 as an officer of Russia\u2019s largest foreign intelligence agency brings the investigation closer to the Kremlin\u2019s doorstep\u2014and to Trump himself.\u201d<\/span>
\nTrump\u2019s longtime political adviser Roger Stone admitted being in touch with Guccifer over Twitter\u2019s direct messaging service. And in August 2016, Stone published an article on the pro-Trump-friendly Breitbart News calling on his political opponents to \u201cStop Blaming Russia\u201d for the hack. \u201cI have some news for Hillary and Democrats\u2014I think I\u2019ve got the real culprit,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t seem to be the Russians that hacked the DNC, but instead a hacker who goes by the name of Guccifer 2.0.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\nFive months later, in January 2017, the CIA, NSA, and FBI assessed \u201cwith high confidence\u201d that \u201cRussian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data.\u201d But the assessment did not directly call Guccifer a Russian intelligence officer. Nor did it provide any evidence for its assertions.<\/span><\/p>\n

It turns out there is a powerful reason to connect Guccifer to the GRU.<\/span><\/p>\n

Guccifer 2.0 sprang into existence on June 15, 2016, hours after a report by a computer security firm forensically tied Russia to an intrusion at the Democratic National Committee. In a series of blog posts and tweets over the following seven months\u2014conspicuously ending right as Trump took office and not resuming\u2014the Guccifer persona published a smattering of the DNC documents while gamely projecting an image as an independent Romanian hacktivist who\u2019d breached the DNC on a lark. As Stone\u2019s Breitbart piece demonstrated, Guccifer provided Moscow with a counter-narrative for the election interference.<\/span><\/p>\n

Guccifer famously pretended to be a \u201clone hacker\u201d who perpetrated the digital DNC break-in. From the outset, few believed it. Motherboard conducted a devastating interview with Guccifer that exploded the account\u2019s claims of being a native Romanian speaker. Based on forensic clues in some of Guccifer\u2019s leaks, and other evidence, a consensus quickly formed among security experts that Guccifer was completely notional.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost immediately various cyber security companies and individuals were skeptical of Guccifer 2.0 and the backstory that he had generated for himself,\u201d said Kyle Ehmke, an intelligence researcher at the cyber security firm ThreatConnect. \u201cWe started seeing these inconsistencies that led back to the idea that he was created hastily\u2026 by the individual or individuals that affected the DNC compromise.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Proving that link definitively was harder. Ehmke led an investigation at ThreatConnect that tried to track down Guccifer from the metadata in his emails. But the trail always ended at the same data center in France. Ehmke eventually uncovered that Guccifer was connecting through an anonymizing service called Elite VPN, a virtual private networking service that had an exit point in France but was headquartered in Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWorking off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency\u2019s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow.\u201d<\/span>
\nBut on one occasion, The Daily Beast has learned, Guccifer failed to activate the VPN client before logging on. As a result, he left a real, Moscow-based Internet Protocol address in the server logs of an American social media company, according to a source familiar with the government\u2019s Guccifer investigation. Twitter and WordPress were Guccifer 2.0\u2019s favored outlets. Neither company would comment for this story, and Guccifer did not respond to a direct message on Twitter.<\/span><\/p>\n

Working off the IP address, U.S. investigators identified Guccifer 2.0 as a particular GRU officer working out of the agency\u2019s headquarters on Grizodubovoy Street in Moscow. (The Daily Beast\u2019s sources did not disclose which particular officer worked as Guccifer.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Security firms and declassified U.S. intelligence findings previously identified the GRU as the agency running \u201cFancy Bear,\u201d the ten-year-old hacking organization behind the DNC email theft, as well as breaches at NATO, Obama\u2019s White House, a French television station, the World Anti-Doping Agency, and countless NGOs, and militaries and civilian agencies in Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus.<\/span><\/p>\n

Timestamps in Guccifer 2.0\u2019s first leaks show they were packaged for release over the course of a single day in June 2016, beginning just hours after the DNC intrusion and its attribution to Russia were made public. The moniker was an homage to Romanian hacker Marcel Laz\u0103r Lehel, who as \u201cGuccifer\u201d achieved notoriety in 2013 for a string of hacks against celebrities and politicians.<\/span><\/p>\n

In his inaugural blog post, Guccifer 2.0 disputed Russia\u2019s involvement and claimed credit personally for the DNC breach, positioning himself as a one-time hacking operation working to expose \u201cthe Illuminati.\u201d The post included the world\u2019s first glimpse of the enormous cache of documents siphoned from the DNC\u2019s network, including the Democrats\u2019 opposition research report on Trump. Presaging the leaks that would roil the election, Guccifer 2.0 declared that he\u2019d already sent the bulk of the stolen material to WikiLeaks\u2014which has spent the time since obfuscating whether Guccifer was its source.<\/span><\/p>\n

On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks began releasing its cache of approximately 19,000 emails and 8,000 attachments stolen in the hack. While Trump promoted the leak on Twitter and in rallies, his surrogate Roger Stone pushed back against the Kremlin attribution. In his August 2016 article for Breitbart, he argued that Guccifer 2.0 was the Romanian hacktivist he claimed to be. \u201cGuccifer 2.0 is the real deal,\u201d he wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last May, Stone admitted that he\u2019d also exchanged direct messages with the Guccifer 2.0 persona, and he released what he claimed was a complete transcript of his communications with the account. The transcript is brief and banal, showing Stone congratulating Guccifer 2.0 on returning to Twitter after a brief suspension, and then mostly ignoring him. Then and since, Stone has consistently denied that Guccifer was connected to the Kremlin.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI myself had no contacts or communications with the Russian State, Russian Intelligence or anyone fronting for them or acting as intermediaries for them,\u201d he wrote.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI myself had no contacts or communications with the Russian State, Russian Intelligence or anyone fronting for them or acting as intermediaries for them.\u201d<\/span>
\n\u2014 Roger Stone<\/span>
\nGuccifer 2.0 maintained a sporadic online presence throughout the election, posting to his dedicated WordPress blog and on Twitter, and spilling more DNC documents, sometimes in private emails to journalists.<\/span><\/p>\n

While the national election clearly interested him (\u201cDemocrats prepare new provocation against Trump,\u201d he thundered in October 2016), Guccifer 2.0 reached down the ballot as well, posting documents from the Democrats\u2019 national campaign committee on his WordPress blog. There, readers could find internal Democratic candidate assessments relevant to battleground states like Pennsylvania and Florida; internal assessments of key congressional districts, with granular analyses of their demographics; and campaign recruitment material.<\/span><\/p>\n

The GRU officer was eager to share this trove, as well. A GOP political operative in Florida, Aaron Nevins, DM\u2019d Guccifer 2.0 a request for \u201cany Florida based information\u201d and received 2.5 gigabytes\u2019 worth, according to The Wall Street Journal. The data, he enthused to Guccifer 2.0, was \u201cprobably worth millions of dollars.\u201d A consultant for a successful Florida Republican congressional candidate told the paper, \u201cI did adjust some voting targets based on some data I saw from the leaks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Sometime after its hasty launch, the Guccifer persona was handed off to a more experienced GRU officer, according to a source familiar with the matter. The timing of that handoff is unclear, but Guccifer 2.0\u2019s last blog post, from Jan. 12, 2017, evinced a far greater command of English that the persona\u2019s earlier efforts.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s obvious that the intelligence agencies are deliberately falsifying evidence,\u201d the post read. \u201cIn my opinion, they\u2019re playing into the hands of the Democrats who are trying to blame foreign actors for their failure.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

(Contrast that with the language from a June 2016 post: \u201cI made some conclusions from the Marcel\u2019s story and decided not to put all eggs in one basket. Moreover, other cases weren\u2019t so successful and didn\u2019t bring me the glory.\u201d)<\/span><\/p>\n

Today the most popular counter-narrative surrounding Guccifer 2.0 concedes that the account was a fake persona but posits that it was created by the DNC to support a false-flag operation implicating Russia. In this theory, advanced in two widely cited anonymous blogs, Guccifer 2.0 was the DNC posing as Russia posing as a Romanian hacker.<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-https:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/exclusive-lone-dnc-hacker-guccifer-20-slipped-up-and-revealed-he-was-a-russian-intelligence-officer<\/span><\/p>\n

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