How the Russians Hacked the DNC

This Sheera Frenkel BuzzFeed story is something else:

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and another 20 people from the Democratic National Convention (DNC), according to research published by the cybersecurity firm SecureWorks. They found the emails by tracing the malicious URLs set up by Fancy Bear using Bitly, the same service used to target Bellingcat. Fancy Bear had set the URL they sent out to read accounts-google.com, rather than the official Google URL, accounts.google.com. Dozens of people were fooled.

“We were monitoring bit.ly and saw the accounts being created in real time,” said Phil Burdette, a senior security researcher at SecureWorks, explaining how they stumbled upon the URLs set up by Fancy Bear. Bitly also keeps data on when a link is clicked, which allowed Burdette to determine that of the 108 email addresses targeted at the Clinton campaign, 20 people clicked on the links (at least four people clicked the link more than once). At the DNC, 16 email addresses were targeted, and 4 people clicked on them.

“They did a great job with capturing the look and feel of Google,” said Burdette, who added that unless a person was paying clear attention to the URL or noticed that the site was not HTTPS secure, they would likely not notice the difference.

Share this: