My new book has a chapter on the Russian Intelligence Services that got into and used mail from the Democratic National Committee. All the attention has come to only one of them - the GRU - but two of them actually hacked the same sites. Today, there is a good opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on the same subject.
My version of this story goes that there were two Russian groups that were hacking in the US and they are both given names by the security groups that discovered them: Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear. Cozy Bear had been sitting quietly inside these sites without disclosing their location - the way an intelligence service should. Fancy Bear joined the fun at least a year later and was discovered. That lead to the discovery of Cozy Bear. It would not be the first time that two groups hacked the same target, but the two are not usually from the same government. Not usually, but it happens.
You have to wonder why the activities were not more coordinated, since they certainly involved risks of exposure for a central government that was already doing very well observing the activities going on inside the Democratic campaign. There is no reason to believe they didn’t have similar efforts inside the Republican campaign too. China has been doing the same for years. Having them exposed could not have been a very good thing for Russia. Groups have a tendency to beef up their security when that happens, making it harder to get in the next time. The exposure leads to retaliation and the kinds of reactions we see today from politicians.
The details in the indictment of the 12 Russian intelligence officers show their capabilities and how they were identified, but they don’t tell us why they were willing to compromise their entire operations when things were well hidden and caused no trouble to them. They could influence without attribution. Changing that actually makes no sense. Putin is an in-your-face kind of guy, but he continues to deny that this was his operation. That makes no sense.
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