The Associated Press has learned the FBI knew for more than a year that Russian hackers were targeting U.S. officials' Gmail accounts and failed to warn them:
Nearly 80 interviews with Americans targeted by Fancy Bear, a Russian government-aligned cyberespionage group, turned up only two cases in which the FBI had provided a heads-up. Even senior policymakers discovered they were targets only when the AP told them, a situation some described as bizarre and dispiriting.
The AP launched an independent investigation into what the FBI has referred to as an overwhelming number of attempted hacks:
The AP did its own triage, dedicating two months and a small team of reporters to go through a hit list of Fancy Bear targets provided by the cybersecurity firm Secureworks.
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The Secureworks list comprises 19,000 lines of targeting data . Going through it, the AP identified more than 500 U.S.-based people or groups and reached out to more than 190 of them, interviewing nearly 80 about their experiences.
Many were long-retired, but about one-quarter were still in government or held security clearances at the time they were targeted. Only two told the AP they learned of the hacking attempts on their personal Gmail accounts from the FBI. A few more were contacted by the FBI after their emails were published in the torrent of leaks that coursed through last year’s electoral contest. But to this day, some leak victims have not heard from the bureau at all.
“It’s utterly confounding,” Phillip Reiner, a former senior director at the National Security Council, who learned of the hack via AP journalists, told The Seattle Times. “You’ve got to tell your people. You’ve got to protect your people.”
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Charles Sowell, another victim of the attack and a former senior administrator in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, doesn’t understand why the bureau didn’t carry out an investigation like the AP.
“It’s absolutely not OK for them to use an excuse that there’s too much data,” Sowell told The Seattle Times. “Would that hold water if there were a serial killer investigation, and people were calling in tips left and right, and they were holding up their hands and saying, ‘It’s too much’? That’s ridiculous.”
FBI gave heads-up to fraction of Russian hackers’ US targets (AP)
FBI FAIL: U.S. OFFICIALS LEFT IN THE DARK ABOUT RUSSIA HACKING CAMPAIGN (Newsweek)