XPost: alt.christian.religion, ca.politics, alt.psychology.psychoanalysis XPost: milw.general

WikiLeaks celebrated its tenth anniversary on Tuesday 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. It's hard to tell, because other than authorship
information, some files have been scrubbed of the "custom
properties" fields that tell things like the version of Office
applications that were used to create them.

Aside from some DNC payroll data, and lease documents for some
Democratic Party field offices, most of the documents in the
dump were originally authored either at the DCCC or by people
working for the DCCC on their personal computers. The file
timestamps correspond to the timeframe of the DNC and DCCC data
breaches, with nothing more recent than July of this year.

The Clinton Foundation's president, former Health and Human
Services Secretary Donna Shalala, denied that the foundation had
been hacked in a Twitter post:

Donna E. Shalala ? @DonnaShalala
No evidence of a #Guccifer hack at @ClintonFdn, no notification
by law enforcement, and none of the files or folders shown are
ours.
2:12 PM - 4 Oct 2016
337 337 Retweets 353 353 likes

Guccifer's post includes a screen grab of what appears to
directory folders, including one labeled "Pay to Play," that
appears to be fabricated from DCCC and DNC files and other
material of questionable provenance. But some of the material
appears to be actual data from the DCCC.

Metadata from a strategy document outlining Republican "pay to
play" tactics in congress shows it was authored at the DCCC.
Metadata from a strategy document outlining Republican "pay to
play" tactics in congress shows it was authored at the DCCC.
[Update: The folder in the full download contains competitive
intelligence reports on incidents where Republican members of
Congress took large donations from companies that directly
benefitted from bills they sponsored—the Republican version of
"Pay to Play". In fact, all of the Word documents in the "Pay to
Play" folder dump have metadata showing they were written at the
DCCC.]

One spreadsheet, called "master-spreadsheet-pac-contributions,"
lists what appear to be congressional campaign donations to
individual representatives and the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee alongside bank names and a column labeled
"Tarp funds"—an apparent reference to the Troubled Asset Relief
Program. The spreadsheet's metadata says that it was created in
2009 by "Kevin McKeon"—and a Kevin McKeon served as the DCCC's
deputy research director at that time.

Another spreadsheet purportedly from 2010, entitled "hfscmemberdonationsbyparty6101," lists members of the House
Financial Services Committee from both parties and shows a list
of what are suggested to be campaign contributions by major
banks and financial institutions. That spreadsheet—which was
apparently created by a Linda K. Strohl and then saved by a Ned
Brown a day later on June 10, 2010—was created on a copy of
Microsoft Excel licensed to "Home." It may have been prepared as
competitive research for the 2010 mid-term congressional races.

A third, later file, appears to be a donor "tracker"
spreadsheet. It is most certainly from the DCCC. Created by
Andrew Bower—another DCCC employee—in 2015, the spreadsheet
contains names and e-mail addresses from the Western US. Ars
directly contacted several of the people listed in the document
and confirmed that the individuals on the list were donors.
While they weren't certain the amounts associated with them were
correct, they confirmed other details were accurate.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/10/guccifer-2-0-posts-dccc- docs-says-theyre-from-clinton-foundation/
 

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)