Leaked top secret NSA report suggests that the Russian hacking reached deeper into our election than previously believed.

Courtesy of The Intercept:  

Russian Military Intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept. 

The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort against elements of the U.S. election and voting infrastructure. 

The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the most detailed U.S. government account of Russian interference in the election that has yet come to light.The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than was previously understood. It states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document: 

Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.

The NSA analysis does not draw conclusions about whether the interference had any effect on the election’s outcome and concedes that much remains unknown about the extent of the hackers’ accomplishments. However, the report raises the possibility that Russian hacking may have breached at least some elements of the voting system, with disconcertingly uncertain results.

This essentially supports other reports that the Russians tried to hack several voting sites.

We are continually told that the Russian hacking did not actually change any votes, but with this kind of evidence surfacing I am becoming less convinced of that.

According to Business Insider this has stunned some security experts:  

"This is indeed a big deal," said Bob Deitz, a veteran of the NSA and CIA who worked under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. "We are lucky that US presidential elections are so localized that it is difficult to do an effective hack." 

Claire Finkelstein, a professor and national security expert at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, said of the document, "Wow, this is huge." 

The leaked report is "evidence for the public now to see yet another example of quite a coherent operation" by the Russians, said Glenn Carle, a CIA veteran and former spy. "And that is significant."

 Just the other day Vladimir Putin once again denied that Russia had anything to do with the hacks, and now we have proof he is lying.

Unfortunately the young woman who provided it was immediately arrested.

Reality Winner, arrested for alleged classified leak, is a former US Air Force linguist who speaks Pashto, Farsi & Dari, her mother tells me pic.twitter.com/SQjt13wRw6

— Jon Swaine (@jonswaine) June 5, 2017

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

The Department of Justice on Monday filed a criminal complaint against Reality Leigh Winner, a federal contractor from Georgia, on charges of removing classified information and disseminating it to the Intercept, NBC News reports.

According to the complaint, Winner, a contractor with Pluribus International Corporation, held Top Secret security clearance at a U.S. government facility. She allegedly printed classified information and sent it to an online news organization. Per the DOJ, she admitted to the offense while the FBI executed a search warrant at her home. 

Personally I am not at all sure if the public would ever have known this information without this young woman's help and that concerns me.

Without those willing to risk incarceration to leak some of this information we may all have gone our merry ways, without ever really understanding how our election was hijacked by the Russians.