DCLeaks

The site is thought by private cybersecurity analysts to be a part of Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. Cybersecurity research firm ThreatConnect concluded that the DCLeaks project showed the hallmarks of Russian intelligence, matching the attack pattern of the GRU hacker group Fancy Bear. On July 13, 2018 a federal grand jury for the District of Columbia indicted 12 members of Unit 26165 of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) for creating the false identity DCLeaks website, hacking the Democratic National Committee and releasing stolen data on the website. == History ==

The domain name dcleaks.com was registered on April 19, 2016, on the THCservers.com and the files were hosted by Shinjiru Technology during the electoral campaign. Leaks On August 12, 2016, the press reported that one DNC computer had been breached for nearly a year, from the summer of 2015 and another in April 2016. The attacker was knocked out of its network during the weekend of June 11 and 12, 2016. In late June 2016, Guccifer 2.0 informed reporters to visit the DCLeaks website for emails stolen from Democrats. With the WikiLeaks disclosure of additional stolen emails beginning on July 22, 2016, more than 150,000 stolen emails from either personal Gmail addresses or via the DNC that were related to the Hillary Clinton 2016 Presidential campaign were published on the DCLeaks and WikiLeaks websites. On August 12, 2016, DCLeaks released roughly 300 emails from Republican targets, including the 2016 campaign staff of Arizona Senator John McCain, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, and 2012 presidential candidate and former Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann. On August 12, 2016, DCLeaks released information about more than 200 Democratic lawmakers, including their personal cellphone numbers. The numerous crank calls that Hillary Clinton received from this disclosure along with the loss of her campaign's email security caused a very severe disruption of her campaign which subsequently changed their contact information on October 7, 2016, by calling each of her contacts one at a time. == Response ==

In December 2016, President Obama stated that, when Obama was in China at the 2016 G20 Hangzhou summit in early September 2016, he told Vladimir Putin not to hack the U.S. election infrastructure. Obama stated, "What I was concerned about in particular was making sure the 2016 DNC hack wasn't compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself." He continued, "So in early September, when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that didn’t happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out and there were going to be serious consequences if he didn’t. And in fact we did not see further tampering of the election process." However, a senior law enforcement official, who is an expert in cyber meddling affairs, stated, "The fact that this is occurring in October is troubling." In February 2020, Rohrabacher told Yahoo News his goal during this meeting with Assange was to find evidence for a widely debunked conspiracy theory that WikiLeaks' real source was not Russian intelligence agents for the DNC emails but former DNC staffer Seth Rich. On February 19, 2020, Edward Fitzgerald, Julian Assange's barrister, asserted at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London that Rohrabacher had been sent on behalf of President Trump in August 2017 to offer Assange a pardon from Trump if Assange could release material to show that Russian hackers were not involved in the 2016 United States election interference. During November 2017, the Associated Press revealed that the FBI had failed to notify almost all of the persons in the cross hairs of the Kremlin-backed Fancy Bear's attack of 312 prominent government and defense officials who had their emails posted on DCLeaks. The FBI was in violation of its own policy of robustly informing victims of hacking. Indictments On July 13, 2018, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that twelve Russian hackers, who were operating in multiple units including Units 26165 and 74455 with the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff (GRU), were named on an 11-count indictment for obtaining access and distributing information from data about 500,000 voters from a state election board website as well as the email accounts of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton, and volunteers and employees of the United States Presidential Campaign of Hillary Clinton (Clinton Campaign), the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Although Roger Stone did not know the names of the Russian's sources, he had publicly stated that these Russians were in contact with the Trump Campaign and that he had communicated with them. Russians had also passed embarrassing information from these hacks to Wikileaks. This led to the resignation of the DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in July, 2016. == See also ==