Feds Arrest NSA Contractor in Leak of Russia’s Top Secret documents. A woman working for the US government has been arrested on suspicion of leaking information from the NSA secret service to the media.
According to the Ministry of Justice, 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner outdated documents about Russian hack attempts from a state-owned state-owned state in Georgia and continued this to the online news media The Intercept.
The woman was arrested one hour after the information appeared on the site. According to The Intercept, the documents contain information about how the Russians tried to penetrate American voting machines using phishing emails.
Yellow Spheres on Paper
The NSA caught the woman on the track because she had printed the documents at the office of the US secret service. Those documents contain pale yellow balls that can read both the printer and date and time.
The documents were scanned by The Intercept and placed online with the yellow balls. As a result, the NSA was able to pick her up, so the US government writes in the charge (pdf). The NSA also discovered that Winner had contact with The Intercept via email.
Russian Hackers
The documents describe how employees of the Russian military intelligence service GRU have attacked a supplier of American voice software.
Also, they tried to invade targeted phishing emails just before the elections of 8 November on computers of more than one hundred people who were professionally involved in the elections at the local level.
The report does not make any conclusions as to whether the Russian interference also had an impact on the outcome of the US elections. Also, according to the NSA, it is difficult to accurately estimate how many Russian hackers have achieved with their attacks.
