Politics
- Russia has repeatedly tried to hack into the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings in an effort to obtain dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, The New York Times found in a bombshell new report.
- Specifically, the report said Russian intelligence operatives are searching for financial documents, emails, and legal records.
- The hacks come after President Donald Trump and his allies engaged in a months-long effort to force Ukraine to dig up or manufacture dirt on the Bidens, specifically related to Hunter Biden's work for Burisma Holdings.
- Oren Falkowitz, a co-founder of the security firm that discovered the hacks, told The Times the attacks were successful and look like "a repeat of Russian interference in the last election."
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Russian military intelligence operatives have been working to hack into Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural-gas company, since at least November, The New York Times found in an explosive new report.
At the time, President Donald Trump's efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate Burisma Holdings were at the center of the US news cycle. Trump's interest in the company spiked after he learned that Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, served on the board of Burisma until earlier this year.
Since then, the US president has leveled unfounded allegations of corruption against the Bidens related to Hunter Biden's work for Burisma.
The Times reported that it's still unclear what the Russian hackers uncovered or what they were looking for. But security experts told the outlet that the timing and scale of the cyberattacks suggest Russian intelligence agents may be digging around for dirt on the Bidens, which is something Trump asked the Ukrainian government, as well as his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and several others to obtain ahead of the 2020 election.
Those requests from Trump made up the basis of a sprawling impeachment inquiry that led the House of Representatives to impeach him last month for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
The Times' report also cited a US security official as saying Russian hacking attempts against Burisma "appear to be running parallel" to efforts by Russian spies in Ukraine to obtain dirt that would embarrass the Bidens. Specifically, they're searching for emails, financial documents, and legal records.
The Times reported that Russia's hacking technique with respect to Burisma bore some significant parallels to when it hacked into the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election and stole thousands of emails that were damaging to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
The Russian government then disseminated those emails to the radical pro-transparency group WikiLeaks in an effort to amplify their effect and launch a disinformation campaign aimed at crippling the Clinton campaign.
Clinton has claimed WikiLeaks' document dumps were a key factor in her defeat to Trump in the election.
Area 1, the cybersecurity firm that said it detected Russia's hacking attempts against Burisma, told The Times that hackers employed a tactic known as spearphishing to obtain sensitive information like usernames and passwords.
They then reportedly created dummy websites that looked like the login pages for Burisma subsidiaries and have since been pelting Burisma's employees with emails that look like they're coming from within the company.
Oren Falkowitz, a co-founder of Area 1 and a former National Security Agency employee, told The Times the attacks this time around were successful and look like "a repeat of Russian interference in the last election."
The US intelligence community determined with high confidence in January 2017 that Russia meddled in the 2016 race specifically to propel Trump to the presidency.
Trump has repeatedly refused to acknowledge those findings and has offered only a lukewarm endorsement of the US intelligence community's conclusions when under pressure.
In recent months, he has also peddled a bogus conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election, a talking point that's frequently pushed by Russian President Vladimir Putin to deflect blame for Russia's 2016 election interference.
There is no evidence that Ukraine meddled in the last election, and there is no evidence that either of the Bidens engaged in any corrupt or legally dubious activity while the younger Biden sat on the board of Burisma.