Weeks later, the DNC caught on to the digital rummaging — and it quickly dawned on officials that they might have a catastrophe on their hands. In June, the DNC went public, blaming Russia for the digital espionage.
But what came next caught everyone — including counterintelligence veterans — off guard. The day after the DNC revealed it had been compromised, an online persona that went by the name Guccifer 2.0 popped up, claiming to be the DNC hacker and posting a sampling of documents stolen from the committee’s servers.
What first appeared to be a confusing oddity quickly became a dominant force in the 2016 election. Guccifer 2.0 proceed to disseminate reams of documents, shopping them to journalists and bloggers around the country in an effort to destabilize both local and national elections. Other mysterious websites, such as
DCLeaks.com, suddenly appeared, posting caches of purloined emails and documents that the media eagerly consumed and converted into splashy headlines. WikiLeaks, the pro-transparency activist group, also started posting stolen DNC emails in July.
Separately, the Clinton campaign was rocked by its own data breach. In March 2016, Russian hackers infiltrated campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal Gmail account, gaining access after Podesta clicked on a link in a fake email instructing him to change his password.
Six months later, WikiLeaks started Podesta’s entire Gmail catalogue online in small, daily batches.
Two months after the 2016 election, a declassified
report issued by the CIA, FBI and NSA — at President Barack Obama’s request — stated with “high confidence” that Russian military intelligence had used the Guccifer 2.0 persona,
DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks to release its hacked documents.
