Top cyber experts have discovered strong proof of the tie between the group that hacked the Democratic National Committee and Russia's military intelligence arm, The Washington Post reports.
CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm hired by the DNC to probe the intrusions, linked malware used in the attack on the DNC to malware used to hack and track an Android phone app used by the Ukrainian army in its fight against pro-Russia separatists from 2014-2016, according to the Post.
CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch noted "we have high confidence" it was a unit of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, according to the Post.
And, the Post notes, the FBI, which has been looking into Russia's hacks of political, government and academic organizations for years, privately came to the same conclusion, but has never publicly pointed the finger at the GRU.
"The GRU is used for both tactical intelligence collection in the battlefield in support of Russian military operations and also strategic active measures or psychological warfare overseas," Alperovitch, who is an expert on Russia and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told the Post.
"The fact that they would be tracking and helping the Russian military kill Ukrainian army personnel in eastern Ukraine and also intervening in the U.S. election is quite chilling."
CrowdStrike reported earlier this year that another group that works for Russian intelligence also hacked the DNC. That group is focused on traditional espionage and is also believed to have gotten into unclassified networks of the State Department, White House and Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to the Post.
The Wall Street Journal noted the new information does little to clarify motives behind the Democratic attacks.
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