Politics

Russians Hacked Burisma: Report

Russian military hackers have successfully infiltrated Burisma, the Ukranian gas company that Hunter Biden worked for between 2014 and 2019.

According to The New York Times, the hackers set their sights on Burisma in early November, when President Donald Trump was facing mounting scrutiny over allegations that he withheld military aid from Ukraine as he pressured its president to investigate Hunter Biden’s dealings with Burisma.

It’s unclear what the hackers were seeking or what they found once they broke into Burisma’s servers.

“The attacks were successful,” Oren Falkowitz, a co-founder of Area1, the firm that detected the Burisma hacking, told The Times.

The hackers broke into Burisma using phishing emails, which is the same method intelligence operatives linked to Russia’s GRU leveraged to hack into the Democratic National Committee and the email account of Hillary Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta in 2016, according to Area1.

“The timing of the Russian campaign mirrors the G.R.U. hacks we saw in 2016 against the D.N.C. and John Podesta,” Falkowitz said. “Once again, they are stealing email credentials, in what we can only assume is a repeat of Russian interference in the last election.”

“The Burisma hack is a cookie-cutter G.R.U. campaign,” Falkowitz added. “Russian hackers, as sophisticated as they are, also tend to be lazy. They use what works. And in this, they were successful.”

Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, joined the board of Burisma in April 2014 shortly after his father was tasked with being the Obama administration’s chief liaison to Ukraine.

Joe Biden boasted in January 2018 that he forced the ouster of Ukraine’s former general prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, after threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan assistance to the country.

Shokin said Joe Biden had him fired to stop him from investigating Burisma, an allegation that Joe Biden denies.