The United States Department of Justice has gathered evidence to charge at least six Russian government officials involved in the DNC hack during the 2016 Presidential election.
In the past months, US intelligence blamed Russia for cyberattacks aimed at influencing the 2016 Presidential Election in Donald Trump’s favour.
An FBI-DHS JAR report released in December 2016 implicated Russian hacking group APT28 and APT29 in attacks against 2016 Presidential Election.
Security experts from Mandiant who analyzed the cyber attacks also linked the hack to a cyber espionage campaign associated with the APT28 group.
Now, the Wall Street Journal reported that United States federal prosecutors could bring charges against the alleged unnamed Russian officials early next year.
“The Justice Department has identified more than six members of the Russian government involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s computers and swiping sensitive information that became public during the 2016 presidential election, according to people familiar with the investigation.” wrote the Wall Street Journal.
The identities of the six suspects are yet to be revealed.
The US federal intelligence investigators believe that Russian Government conducted a larger campaign that involved “dozens” of other Russian officials in the DNC hack and subsequent data leak.
The acted obeying a direct order of the Russian President Vladimir Putin, that always denied allegations.
The hackers who breached the DNC computer system in 2016 leaked thousands of stolen DNC emails, including personal and sensitive emails from Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.
The sensitive information was published by the WikiLeaks website.
This is the second time in 2017 when the US Government has charged Russian officials with hacking crimes, in March 2017, the US authorities charged two former Russian FSB agents and two hackers for 2014 Yahoo data breach that caused the exposure of 500 Million Yahoo Accounts.
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(Security Affairs – Russian Government officials, DNC hack)
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