Russia’s GRU hackers pose as an anonymous online figure named Guccifer 2.0 to send illegally obtained documents from the Democratic National Committee to investigative news site The Smoking Gun.
William Bastone, the editor-in-chief of investigative news site The Smoking Gun, got an email bearing a small cache of documents marked “CONFIDENTIAL.”
“Hi,” the message said. “This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.”
Associated Press
The Guccifer persona, whose broken English couldn’t hide that he wasn’t an American hacktivist like the DCLeaks website could, claims he is Romanian.
The hackers spend the rest of the month contacting journalists via Twitter, proclaiming that WikiLeaks will reveal the real treasure chest of information, and promoting DCLeaks.com.
DCLeaks (which also launched its Facebook and Twitter profiles around this time) slowly leaks a few documents at a time between June and July leading up to the WikiLeaks drop on July 22. Between Guccifer 2.0, DCLeaks, and WikiLeaks, Russians leak over 150,000 emails belonging to more than a dozen Democrats throughout 2016.
Source
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2017-11-03/inside-story-how-russians-hacked-the-democrats-emails
https://heavy.com/news/2018/07/dcleaks-russian-hackers/
Photo: Public Domain
