Category Archives: Michael Rogers

Before taking office, Trump was told Putin ordered DNC hack, reports say

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Two weeks before assuming the office of the presidency, Donald Trump was shown highly classified intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally ordered a wave of Russian-sponsored hacking and disinformation blitzes to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. According to the New York Times, who first reported the news Wednesday, the evidence was compiled from Russian military officers’ digital footprints, intercepted by U.S. and allied intelligence agencies, as well as top-secret sources close to Putin, who told the CIA how Moscow orchestrated its digital interference operation. Speaking to CNN on Thursday morning, James Clapper confirmed that Trump was briefed on Putin’s personal involvement in Russia’s 2016 election cyberattacks, adding: “we left very highly classified written documents that laid out in more detail the evidence.” The directors of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and national intelligence, John Brennan, Michael Rogers, James Comey, and Clapper, respectively, briefed the president-elect on January 6, […]

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Macron leaks contained phishing links to domains associated with APT28, researchers say

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The hacked emails leaked last week from the campaign of French President-elect Emmanuel Macron contain phishing links pointing to domains associated with Fancy Bear, the hacking group also known as APT28 that has been linked to Russian intelligence agencies, according to the cybersecurity firm Flashpoint. “Flashpoint’s hypothesis [is] that the Macron leak was undertaken by Fancy Bear based on the contents of the dump itself, as well as the current and historic political environment in which this attack took place,” said Vitali Kremez, research director for Flashpoint. The same group was blamed for hacking Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee in 2016, and researchers have recently linked other high-profile phishing attempts to the group. “These domains were likely registered and deployed in the phishing emails in order to harvest the login credentials of Macron campaign personnel,” Kremez said. “These credentials could have provided hackers with the information needed to obtain the documents in the […]

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NSA alerted France to ‘Russian activity’ against presidential campaign targets, Rogers says

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The U.S. National Security Agency tracked Russian hackers working against French political targets and then alerted French authorities prior to the “massive and coordinated hack” against the campaign of President-elect Emmanuel Macron, the NSA’s chief said Tuesday. Macron won convincingly even though the hack resulted in a massive email dump about a day before French voters headed to the polls, but upcoming crucial elections across Europe have raised alert levels for Western intelligence agencies tasked with fighting Russian interference. Adm. Michael Rogers, who leads both the U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday. He was asked about the United States’ role in protecting elections inside and outside of U.S. borders. “We had become aware of Russian activity,” Rogers said. “We had talked to our French counterparts prior to the public announcements of the events that were publicly attributed this past weekend. We said, ‘Look we are watching […]

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FBI Director: U.S. should expect Russian interference in 2018, 2020 elections

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FBI Director James Comey expects that Russian intelligence services will launch similar influence operations against the 2018 congressional and 2020 presidential elections after finding success in 2016. “They’ll be back,” said Comey, who spoke Monday before the House Intelligence Committee. “They’ll be back in 2020. They may be back in 2018. One of the lessons they may draw from this is that they were successful because they introduced chaos and division and discord and sewed doubt about the nature of this amazing country of ours and our democratic process.” Russian attempts to “undermine the credibility” of American democracy, as Comey described it, differed last year from past cases of Kremlin interference. NSA Director Adm. Michael Rogers, who also testified Monday alongside Comey, said that the biggest difference evident in 2016 was the leaking of documents online and the resulting spread through media channels. “A big difference to me in the past […]

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