U.S Intelligence Hacking Report States Russia Plans More Attacks

A declassified report on alleged Russian cyber attack, suggests that this is not going to be the last cyber attack Russia will carry out against the U.S.

The report claims that Russia began a “spear-phishing” campaign after Election Day to try and trick U.S government officials into revealing their email passwords.  Among those targeted included employees that worked in national security, defence, and foreign policy.

The report claims, “This campaign could provide material for future influence efforts as well as foreign intelligence collection on the incoming administration’s goals and plans.”

In theory this could make things difficult for President-elect Donald Trump.  He wants to improve relations between the two countries and has often rejected the U.S intelligence community’s claim that Russia was involved.

The new report claims that Vladimir Putin had a clear preference for Trump to win the election.

The report went into detail about the efforts to hack the Democratic National Committee and the individual email account of campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Although Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder has denied the information came from the Russians, the report claims that the data was given to a third party who passed the information on to Wikileaks.

The report states, “We assess with high confidence that the GRU (a top Russian intelligence agency) relayed material it acquired from the DNC and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks.”

According to the report paid “trolls” and fake news was used to undermine Hilary Clinton.

Trump met the heads of U.S intelligence in a New York Meeting on Friday.  Although he did not say he accepted the claims that Russia was behind the hack, he did say that “he learned a lot”.

The report was not particularly detailed, however, and how U.S Intelligence learned that Russia hacked the Democrats was noticeably absent.

Trump has said he would appoint a team to stop future cyber attacks against the U.S.