The Democratic National Committee Friday filed a lawsuit against a broad slate of people and entities allegedly responsible for the 2016 hack of its email, phone calls, and more. But while the suit claims involvement from a host of headliners[1]—Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Donald Trump, Jr., and Russia among them—its immediate importance lies in the previously unreported timeline it lays out.
While a rough outline of the DNC hack[2] that rocked the 2016 election had previously been established, the 66-page lawsuit, first reported by The Washington Post[3] gives exact dates for the first time. It also asserts coordination among a web of characters[4] affiliated with the Trump campaign, Russia’s GRU intelligence service, and WikiLeaks.
“No one is above the law,” the suit begins. “In the run-up to the 2016 election, Russia mounted a brazen attack on American Democracy.”
The details of when and how that attack occurred, though, are more clear than ever—and may indicate that Russia’s plan to interfere in the US election predated its DNC intrusion.
Between repairing and replacing equipment and hiring experts to manage the fallout, the bill came out to over a million dollars.
According to the DNC lawsuit, Russian intelligence group Cozy Bear—the GRU-affiliated hacker group, also known as APT29—infiltrated the DNC network as far back as July 27, 2015, nearly a year before the leaks of the pilfered material began. The suit says that a second Russian group—Fancy Bear, the outfit that has recently tormented the International Olympic Committee [5] as well—hacked the DNC’s systems on April 18, 2016. The DNC wouldn’t notice the presence of either until April 28, 2016, at which point it called in security firm CrowdStrike to help analyze and mitigate the damage.
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