“Guccifer 2.0” is a person or persona claiming to be the hacker(s) that hacked into the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer network and then leaked its documents to the media the websiteWikiLeaks, and a conference event. Some of the documents they claim to have released appear to be forgeries cobbled together from public information and previous hacks, which they then salted with disinformation.
Cybersecurity experts and firms, including CrowdStrike, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Mandiant, SecureWorks, ThreatConnect, and the editor for Ars Technica, as well as the US intelligence community, believe that some of the genuine leaks that Guccifer 2.0 has claimed were part of a series of cyberattacks on the DNC committed by two Russian intelligence groups.
The Russian government claims it had no involvement in the theft.
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said that there was no proof that Russia was behind the attack. Assange has stated that he has sympathy for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Various cybersecurity experts have speculated that “Guccifer 2.0” is likely a creation of the Russian state-sponsored hacking groups thought to have executed the attack, invented to coverup Russian responsibility. The cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which analyzed the data breach, “posits that Guccifer 2.0 could be ‘part of a Russian Intelligence disinformation campaign'”—i.e., a creation to deflect blame for the theft.
Russia has made use of the invention of “a lone hacker or an hacktivist to deflect blame” in the past, deploying this strategy in previous cyberattacks on the German government and the French networkTV5Monde.
Thomas Rid of King’s College London, a cybersecurity expert, states that it is “‘more likely than not’ that the whole operation, including the Guccifer 2.0 part, was orchestrated by Russian spies,” and others concur.
As of July 2016, US intelligence was not yet certain whether the breaches were normal espionage or whether they are part of a concerted effort by Russia and Wikileaks to attempt to manipulate the 2016 US Presidential election.
Background
On June 21, 2016, in an interview with Vice “Guccifer 2.0” claimed that he is Romanian.
[24] On June 30, 2016, “Guccifer 2.0” stated that he is not Russian.
However, despite claiming not to be able to read or understand Russian, metadata of emails sent from Guccifer 2.0 to The Hill showed that a Russian-language-only VPN was used.
When pressed to use the Romanian language in an interview with Motherboard via online chat, “he used such clunky grammar and terminology that experts believed he was using an online translator.”
On July 18, 2016, government spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied Russian government involvement in the DNC theft.
On July 25, 2016, during an interview with Democracy Now!, Julian Assange, editor in chief of WikiLeaks, said that no one knows WikiLeaks’ sources. He adds that “the dates of the emails that [WikiLeaks] published are significantly after all—or all but one, it is not clear—of the hacking allegations that the DNC says have occurred.”
The same day, Assange told NBC News that “it’s what’s in the emails that’s important, not who hacked them.”
When asked by NBC News if WikiLeaks might have been used to distribute documents stolen as part of a Russian intelligence operation, Assange replied: “There is no proof of that whatsoever. We have not disclosed our source.”
Assange, who once briefly hosted a program on RT, a Russian state-run news channel, said that this was “a diversion that’s being pushed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.”
Assange has a well-known personal disdain for Hillary Clinton and Wikileaks’ official Twitter account issued a large number of political tweets condemning her campaign.
Computer hacking activities
On June 14, 2016, according to The Washington Post, the DNC acknowledged a hack which was claimed by Guccifer 2.0.
On July 18, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 provided exclusively to The Hill numerous documents and files covering political strategies,including but not limited to correlating the banks that received bailout funds withRepublican Party and Democratic Party donations.
On July 22, 2016, the hacker Guccifer 2.0 claimed he hacked, then leaked, the DNC emails to WikiLeaks.
“Wikileaks published #DNCHack docs I’d given them!!!”, tweeted Guccifer 2.0.
On September 13, 2016, during a conference, an unknown and remote representative of Guccifer 2.0 released almost 700 megabytes worth of documents from the DNC.
Forbes also obtained a copy of those.
Which focused on the DNC’s information technology infrastructure and analysis of party donors.
Still according to Forbes, on September 12, 2016, ahead of that conference, Guccifer posted a public Twitter message in which he confirmed that his representative was legitimate.
The Russian government denied any involvement.
The DNC, the DCCC, U.S. intelligence officials, and other experts speculated about Russia involvement.
NGP VAN, who claims to be the “leading technology provider” for the Democratic campaigns, declined to comment on Guccifer 2.0’s recent statements.
On October 4, 2016, Guccifer 2.0 released almost 860 megabytes of documents allegedly taken from the Clinton Foundation.
Guccifer 2.0 claimed those documents implicate the Clinton Foundation and alleged Clinton Foundation donors in embezzlement from the $475 billion TARP public funds intended for what is often known as the “Wall Street Bailout” of 2008, however the donor list does not match that of the Clinton Foundation and instead seems to have been taken in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hacks.
The Clinton Foundation denied it was hacked and claimed that the documents are a forgery by Russian government propagandists. One journalist remarked that it seems absurd that Clinton’s team would have actually named a file “Pay for Play” on their own server, as Guccifer 2.0’s screen shots of the alleged hack show.
Guccifer 2.0 website : https://guccifer2.wordpress.com/
But
https://medium.com/@nyetnyetnyet/russia-and-wikileaks-the-case-of-the-gilded-guccifer-f2288521cdee#.afiwugdeg
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There’s way too much that’s suspect about the Guccifer2 persona…
http://g-2.space and https://medium.com/@nyetnyetnyet/russia-and-wikileaks-the-case-of-the-gilded-guccifer-f2288521cdee highlight various anomalies.