Of the DNC hacking and what you need to know about Kompromat practice

The leaks come from the accounts of seven key figures in the DNC: Communications Director Luis Miranda (10770 emails), National Finance Director Jordon Kaplan (3797 emails), Finance Chief of Staff Scott Comer (3095 emails), Finance Director of Data & Strategic Initiatives Daniel Parrish (1472 emails), Finance Director Allen Zachary (1611 emails), Senior Advisor Andrew Wright (938 emails) and Northern California Finance Director Robert (Erik) Stowe (751 emails). The emails covered the period from January last year until 25 May this year.

The release comes just weeks after a hacker, or group of hackers, under the name Guccifer 2.0, initiated a release of records from the DNC’s computer systems. The hacker(s) claim to be Romanian, but many believe the records may have been taken by team of Russian hackers who are trying to keep investigators off their tail. Of the documents are internal planning memos and databases of Democratic donors.

The leaks reveal discussion between DNC staff regarding how to deal with Bernie Sanders’ popularity, calling it a challenge to Clinton’s candidacy, and, rather than treating him as a viable candidate for the Democratic ticket, they chose to work against him and his campaign to ensure the nomination was set in stone for Clinton.

In an interview on Sunday Night on Fox News, U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Russian intelligence services hacked into Democratic National Committee computers and she accused Republican contender Donald Trump of showing support for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC and we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin,” Clinton said in an interview.

The United States has not publicly accused Russia of being behind the hack of Democratic Party computers. But if the US dailies are anything to go by, Cyber security experts and U.S. officials, however, said they believed Russia engineered the release of the emails to influence the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election.

So what if Russia was behind the attack? If Russia was indeed behind last week’s leak of stolen data from the Democratic National Committee, well there is a Russian word for it. According to New York Times, this practice is called “kompromat.” A portmanteau of the Russian words for “compromising” and “material,” it refers to the timeworn tradition of obtaining information and using it to smear or influence public officials. Unscrupulous Russian politicians have been doing it for decades; there are kompromat websites (which, unsurprisingly, are often blocked or harassed).

The way it works is simple. First, Kremlin insiders or other powerful individuals buy, steal or manufacture incriminating information about an opponent, an enemy, or any other person who poses a threat to powerful interests. Then, they publish it, destroying the target’s reputation in order to settle public scores or manipulate public events.

The term may be Russian, but kompromat is not limited to the country’s borders. Chinese officials and businessmen, for instance, have long been rumored to spy on their personal and professional rivals, searching for information that could be used to discredit them.

The Russian operations are quite distinctive from Chinese though both of the attackers use phishing and APT as a means of getting access and maintaining it.

If American officials and analysts are correct in their assessment that Russia was behind this hack of the Democratic National Committee’s computer servers, it seems that kompromat is being translated to the international stage.

The Russians have made clear that they believe the United States is behind the release of the Panama Papers, which include material embarrassing to Putin. They are upset about the Olympics doping scandal, which they also believe was fomented by Western intelligence agencies.

The Chinese and Russians are used to these tactics to settle political and business rivalries. The D.N.C. hack, in exporting kompromat abroad, has established a precedent that may tempt other hackers foreign and domestic, state-sponsored and private.

Because technology makes hacks easier to start than to counter, the risk is difficult to overcome. And anyone with money or expertise can undertake a hack, particularly against nonstate targets that have weaker security systems, and often with little risk of being caught because the attack can be denied.

The United States has had plenty of experience with hackers, government and otherwise, but the D.N.C. hack is something new. Rather than using the information seized for intelligence purposes, the hackers selected damaging excerpts from the cache of stolen data, and then leaked them at a pivotal moment in the presidential election.

This practice is beyond the reach or enforcement of most laws, and outside the scope of the norms that limit states’ interference in one another’s affairs. And because effective defense is so difficult, it is hard to predict what the limits — or the consequences — of that might be.

Trump last week invited Russia to dig up tens of thousands of “missing” emails from Clinton’s time at the U.S. State Department. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” Trump told reporters.

The Republican presidential nominee for the Nov. 8 election later said he was being “sarcastic” in his comments, which raised concerns among intelligence experts and criticism that Trump was urging a foreign government to spy on Americans