Hacker puts hundreds of US Democratic party documents online

A hacker by the name of “Guccifer 2.0” has released hundreds of pages of documents, which he claims have stolen from a Democratic National Committee server, the main governing body of the US Democratic party.

Among the documents are the election plans of possible Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and a report on her opponent Donald Trump. In addition, there are documents about donations to the Democrats. In his blog post, the hacker refers to the analysis carried out by security company CrowdStrike after the hack.

The company claimed that the hack was carried out by two parties linked to Russian intelligence services. These would be known as ‘cozy bear’ and ‘fancy bear’, or CozyDuke/APT29 and Sofacy/APT28 respectively. The latter party was recently also designated by Germany as responsible for the hack on the Bundestag. According to CrowdStrike, these parties have been present in the DNC’s systems since the summer of 2015.

However, the hacker now claims that he carried out the hack himself and that he is flattered by the wording of the security company. He adds that it was “very easy” to break into the servers. The published documents also appear to contradict CrowdStrike’s findings that no financial documents were taken. The company responds in an update to its post on the hacker’s blog post and states that it will stick to its own findings. It also states that the blog post may be a confusion attempt by the Russian security services.

Guccifer 2.0 claims that it forwarded much of the stolen data to WikiLeaks and that the site will publish it shortly. CrowdStrike says it is still investigating the authenticity of the documents. However, a security researcher tells Ars Technica that the data may be genuine. The other possibility is that it concerns counterfeit documents, but in that case a lot of research and preparation was required, according to the researcher.

The name ‘Guccifer’ refers to the Romanian hacker of the same name, who is responsible for attacks on the families of former Bush presidents and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.