Russia’s hackers took only a week to pry into Clinton camp

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

Nineteen thousand lines of raw data associated with the theft of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign staffers show how the hackers managed the election-shaking operation.

Minute-by-minute logs gathered by the cybersecurity company Secureworks and recently shared with The Associated Press suggest it took the hackers a little more than a week of work to zero in on and penetrate the personal Gmail account of campaign chairman John Podesta.

One outside expert who reviewed the data said it showed how even the well-defended Clinton campaign fell prey to phishing, a basic cyberespionage technique that uses bogus emails to harvest passwords.

“They were the most security-aware campaign that I’m aware of,” said Markus Jakobsson, the chief scientist at email security company Agari. “And yet this happened.”

Hillaryclinton.com emails were locked down using two-factor authentication, a technique that uses a second passcode to keep accounts secure. Other measures included the automatic deletion of most messages after 30 days and phishing drills for staff. Security awareness even followed the campaigners into the bathroom, where someone put a picture of a toothbrush under the words: “You shouldn’t share your passwords either.”

But hackers who began their break-in attempts on March 10, 2016, with random emails to obsolete hillaryclinton.com addresses quickly learned their way around the campaign’s address book, first targeting senior staffers at work before switching to their Gmail inboxes, some of which had not been protected with two-factor authentication.

On March 19, the hackers appear to have broken into Podesta’s personal inbox, setting the stage for weeks of embarrassing disclosures.

Overall, the AP documented more than 400 attempts to break into Clinton staffers and Democratic operatives between March and May of 2016 – an illustration of what Jakobsson said was a key principal behind most phishing attempts.

The AP’s reporting has shown how the hackers who hit Podesta acted globally in close alignment with the Russian government’s interests – backing assessments made by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russian spies were responsible. Here’s a sampling of the evidence:

The hackers worked business hours, Moscow time

They created nearly all their links from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Moscow time, according to AP’s analysis of the data. They were busiest in the midday hours and took weekends off.

Weeks after the hack, a Trump adviser was told that emails were in Russian hands.

In recently unsealed court documents, a former Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser said he was told by a professor closely connected to the Russian government that the Kremlin had obtained thousands of emails with “dirt” about Clinton.