Within an hour of the story’s publication, the law enforcement agency declared the arrest of the alleged source of the leaked report. Reality leigh Winner was arrested at home in Augusta, Georgia when the National Security Agency audit identified her as the one who written and removed the report from a secure facility. The Intercept had turned over a duplicate of the report back to the National Security Agency to verify its origin while inquiring for comment. once analysis of the document showed that it had been closed up, suggesting it had been written, the National Security Agency determined only six workers had access to the document, and the only Winner had been in e-mail contact with The Intercept.
Seven e-mail accounts at the seller company were targeted with a technique kind of like the one that obtained access to e-mail accounts utilized by members of the Clinton campaign earlier in 2016, in keeping with the text of the report. a minimum of one of those accounts seems to possess been compromised, as info from the corporate was then utilized in 2 separate sets of e-mails with malicious attachments sent to election officers just days before the election.
The first was a wave of e-mails on October 31 and November 1 sent to 122 native election officers whose e-mail addresses might are harvested from a compromised trafficker e-mail account. The e-mails delivered otherwise legitimate Microsoft Word documents from the corporate that gave instructions on the way to use software package to examine a voter’s registration status. The files had been “Trojanized” with Visual Basic for Applications code that accessed a malicious website and will have installed spying malware on the targets’ computers.
The National Security Agency report indicated that it absolutely was not clear if the attacks were successful or what the extra malware was. The author of the report noted that the attacks share characteristics with previous GRU-attributed operations. However, the report indicated that they were able to determine web traffic from victims associated with the malware, that spoofed “agent” info for a Mozilla Firefox applications program to try to hide from packet scrutiny tools.
Whether or not the attacks really compromised the computers of election officers and the other ballot information has not been determined. The dates don’t match up with antecedently according to attacks on state election officers.
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