Enlarge / Reduce, reuse, recycle those hacks. (credit: Ildar Sagdejev )
WikiLeaks celebrated its tenth anniversary today by teasing a release of documents that would damage presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. But when Julian Assange failed to release anything new, the individual who refers to himself as Guccifer 2.0 posted what he claimed were files from the Clinton Foundation’s servers.
“Many of you have been waiting for this, some even asked me to do it,” Guccifer 2.0, or whoever is posting under that name, wrote in a blog post. “So, this is the moment. I hacked the Clinton Foundation server and downloaded hundreds of thousands of docs and donors’ databases. Hillary Clinton and her staff don’t even bother about the information security. It was just a matter of time to gain access to the Clinton Foundation server.” Ars contacted Guccifer 2.0, or whomever runs his Twitter account. He claimed the files came directly from the Clinton Foundation server—but declined to say how he got access to them (“I prefer to keep it to me yet”).
However, a review by Ars found that the files are clearly not from the Clinton Foundation. While some of the individual files contain real data, much of it came from other breaches Guccifer 2.0 has claimed credit for at the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—hacks that researchers and officials have tied to “threat groups” connected to the Russian Government. Other data could have been aggregated from public information, while some appears to be fabricated as propaganda.