Americas

  • United States

Asia

Oceania

Newest Guccifer 2.0 DNC dump included personal info about celebrities and CEOs

News
Jul 19, 20163 mins
Data and Information SecurityInternet SecuritySecurity

Besides political dirt, the latest leak from the DNC breach included phone numbers, email and physical addresses for celebrity Democratic donors and CEOs

Democratic National Committee hacker Guccifer 2.0 gave The Hill another batch of pilfered DNC documents. These are different than the files that included information on 11,000 donors given to The Hill last week. At that time, Guccifer claimed the press had been forgetting about him, that WikiLeaks was “playing for time” and he still had documents to dump.

Apparently Guccifer 2.0, or potentially the Russian government pulling the strings behind the “real” hackers, wants to keep the DNC breach and the dirt gleaned from it in the news.

Some of the political insights revealed in the latest dump include a document that described the (then upcoming) Iran nuclear framework deal as a “good deal to protect national security.” It added that “wobbly [D]emocrats want to scratch this thing.”

There were complaints about not being able to move anything in the “most anti-immigrant” Congress, as well as notes about gun control, “gut[ted] Medicaid” and partisan stalling tactics for the attorney general nomination.

Guccifer 2.0 also leaked spreadsheets that included personal information, such as names, phone numbers, addresses and email addresses of celebrities, executives and thousands of high-profile donors.

One file called “SoCal” had 359 entries. Some of the business figures mentioned by The Hill were “Elon Musk; the CEOs of Qualcomm, the Starz Network, Disney and Fox Film; and high-ranking executives at Google, Fox, ABC, Herbalife and Warner Brothers.”

Regarding celebrities and other entertainment figures, The Hill name-dropped Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Judd Apatow, Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen, Dianne Keaton, Rob Reiner, Norman Lear and Magic Johnson.

The file also noted total donations, last donation and which nickname the donor preferred to be called. The Hill wrote:

For example, “Gore” is used for “Pirates of the Caribbean” director Gregor “Gore” Verbinski, who donated $10,000, and “JJ” for writer/director/producer Jeffery “JJ” Abrams, who donated $33,400.

The latest leak has various lists, including one with names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers for more than 700 “power” women.

The Hill reported that files also included “entries for the CEOs of Oracle, the UC Davis Medical Center, 23andMe, J. Crew and Taskrabbit, as well as Stanford’s Dean of Global Health and executives at Intuit, Brightroll, PG&E and CBS.”

Although Guccifer 2.0 has maintained that he is a hacker from Romania, cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike said two Russian hacking groups, Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, are actually behind the DNC breach. Fidelis Cybersecurity agreed that the Russian hacking teams are behind the hack.

ms smith

Ms. Smith (not her real name) is a freelance writer and programmer with a special and somewhat personal interest in IT privacy and security issues. She focuses on the unique challenges of maintaining privacy and security, both for individuals and enterprises. She has worked as a journalist and has also penned many technical papers and guides covering various technologies. Smith is herself a self-described privacy and security freak.