Pierluigi Paganini
September 15, 2016
Powell’s emails sent in a couple of years have been published on the website DC Leaks in a section protected by a password that was available only to select news outlets. The Powell’s e-mails belong to a new batch not included in the Powell dump leaked a few years ago.
The emails report Powell’s correspondence with his strict collaborators, his team at a speakers bureau and journalists over a period of 26 months.
The emails, that span from June 2014 to the last month, includes the severe Powell’s comments on presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
The data leakage was attributed to a group of Russian state-sponsored hackers, known as APT28 or Fancy Bear. The group is the same that recently leaked US athletics’ medical records stolen from the World Anti-Doping Agency.
According to an investigation conducted by researchers at security firm ThreatConnect, the hackers are linked to the Kremlin.
Powell told the The New York Times that the leaked messages are authentic.
“An aide to Mr. Powell confirmed the hack and said, “They are his emails.”.”
Powell was highly critical of many politicians, in one of the hacked email, he calls Trump ‘National Disgrace and an international pariah.’
A message, dated June 23, 2016, was sent by Colin Powell to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reads:
“if Donald were to somehow win, by the end of the first week in office he’d be saying ‘What the hell did I get myself into?'”
Colin Powell also criticized the Hilary Clinton’s campaign and the way she managed the theft of her emails.
“I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect,” Powell wrote. “A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still d—ing bimbos at home (according to the NYP).”
The Clinton campaign’s “email ploy this week didn’t work and she once again looks shifty if not a liar,” Powell wrote on August 20 to someone he worked with at the White House. “Trump folks having fun with her.”
In a separate leaked email exchange reported by NBC News, Powell also criticized aides to Hillary Clinton for their attempts to involve him in the case of the theft of her email due the use of a private email server when she served as Secretary of State.
In other emails reported by BuzzFeed News, Colin Powell accuses Trump of having embraced a “racist” movement when he publicly questioned the validity of President Obama’s birth certificate.
“Yup, the whole birther movement was racist,” Mr. Powell wrote in an email to a former aide, according to BuzzFeed. “That’s what the 99% believe. When Trump couldn’t keep that up he said he also wanted to see if the certificate noted that he was a Muslim. As I have said before, ‘What if he was?’ Muslims are born as Americans everyday.” Reported the NYT.
It’s still not clear how the hackers have compromised the Powell’s Gmail account in order to steal the messages.
Some experts argued that Powell’s Gmail account was hacked because he shared the same login credentials with a web service that was compromised in the past. Colin Powell’s Gmail credentials were also used to access DropBox and this data are contained in Dropbox dump recently leaked online.
Colin Powell’s emails have been leaked a few months after the mysterious hacker Guccifer 2.0 hacked the Democratic National Committee. Powell’s e-mails were published on a password-protected portion of DC Leaks that was available only to select news outlets. So far, there have been no definitive reports on precisely how the messages were obtained by DC Leaks.
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(Security Affairs – Colin Powell’s emails, Data Breach)
Data Breach / November 21, 2024
