The hacker calling himself ‘Guccifer 2.0’ says he broke into the computers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, making public their password lists, cell phone numbers, and many campaign documents.
“As you see the U.S. presidential elections are becoming a farce, a big political performance where the voters are far from playing the leading role. Everything is being settled behind the scenes as it was with Bernie Sanders,” the hacker wrote on his blog. “I wonder what happened to the true democracy, to the equal opportunities, the things we love the United States for.”
“The [mainstream media] are producing tons of propaganda hiding the real stuff behind it. But I do believe that people have right to know what’s going on inside the election process in fact,” the hacker wrote. “To make a long story short, here are some DCCC docs from their server. Make use of them.”
One of the documents listed mobile phone numbers and email addresses of every Democrat in the House of Representatives.
The hacker also posted three files with passwords used to access publication subscriptions and other DCCC files, with special thanks" to the GCCC staffer from whose emails he obtained the documents.
"By the way, the complexity of the passwords leaves much to be desired," the hacker wrote, referring to the frequently used ones such as "welcome" and "democrat."
For some reason, the GCCC had a login to conservative commentator Glenn Beck's website, for which they used the password "nutbag."
Washington has blamed the Russian government for the hack, and unnamed officials within the Obama administration said this week they were contemplating new sanctions against Moscow in retaliation, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Though the DNC has blamed the Russian of breaching the security of its servers, the hacker – whose moniker is a nod to Romanian hacker Marcel Lazar Lehel, currently jailed in the US for hacking a number of celebrities and politicians – maintains he is the lone force behind the leaked documents.
“It seems the guys from CrowdStrike and the DNC would say I’m a Russian bear even if I were a catholic nun,” he wrote in a June 30 post. “At first I was annoyed and disappointed. But now I realize they have nothing else to say. There’s no other way to justify their incompetence and failure. It’s much easier for them to accuse powerful foreign special services.”
“They can prove nothing! All I hear is blah-blah-blah, unfounded theories and somebody’s estimates,” he added.
Guccifer 2.0 also said he was the source for the DNC documents published in July by Wikileaks, which wasalso blamed on Russia.