Russia denies DNC hack and says maybe someone ‘forgot the password’

[Valin]

Washington Post:

Andrew Roth

June 15 2016

 

MOSCOW — When Russia faces uncomfortable accusations from abroad, the Kremlin normally lashes back with official declarations and scornful comments on state television.

 

But when the Democratic National Committee and cybersecurity experts told The Washington Post that Russian government hackers had stolen an entire database of opposition research on presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, officials here met the accusations with little more than a simple denial and a shrug.

 

"Usually these kinds of leaks take place not because hackers broke in, but, as any professional will tell you, because someone simply forgot the password or set the simple password 123456," German Klimenko, Putin's top Internet adviser, said in remarks carried by the RIA Novosti state news agency. "Well, it's always simpler to explain this away as the intrigues of enemies, rather than one's own incompetence."

 

"I absolutely rule out the possibility that the government or government agencies were involved in this," Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, told journalists in a curt statement.

 

 

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[Valin]

A Chaotic Whodunnit Follows the DNC’s Trump Research Hack
Andy Greenberg
06.15.16

Finding the perpetrator of a sophisticated hacker intrusion can be messy. Getting to the bottom of a vicious data breach at the center of a no-holds-barred presidential campaign is a full-on trainwreck.

On Wednesday, Gawker and the Smoking Gun published the Democratic National Committee’s opposition research files on Republican presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump, which the DNC admitted earlier in the week had been stolen by hackers. And a hacker using the name Guccifer 2.0 posted a sample of the files to WordPress, along with a taunting note. “Guccifer may have been the first one who penetrated Hillary Clinton’s and other Democrats’ mail servers. But he certainly wasn’t the last,” the hacker wrote, referring to earlier claims by a well-known Romanian hacker known as Guccifer, who has said he penetrated Clinton’s unofficial email servers during her time as secretary of state before being arrested and extradited to the US earlier this year. “No wonder […] any other hacker could easily get access to the DNC’s servers.”

The leaked documents, more than 200 pages of Trump’s record of offensive statements, dishonest remarks, and questionable business moves, call him a “misogynist-in-chief” with “no core.” On his WordPress site, Guccifer 2.0 separately posted a sample of donor information stolen from the DNC’s servers, apparently contradicting the DNC’s earlier claims that no financial information was lost in its breach. The hacker also claimed to have given “thousands of files and mails” to WikiLeaks.

 

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Question: Has The RNC been hacked?