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WASHINGTON — When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk. His message was brief, if alarming. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. Had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government. Knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks. Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C.

Who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. Computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks — in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I.

Agent and not an impostor. It was the cryptic first sign of a cyberespionage and information-warfare campaign devised to disrupt the 2016 presidential election, the first such attempt by a foreign power in American history. What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J.

Like another famous American election scandal, it started with a break-in at the D.N.C. The first time, 44 years ago at the committee’s old offices in the Watergate complex, the burglars planted listening devices and jimmied a filing cabinet. This time, the burglary was conducted from afar, directed by the Kremlin, with spear-phishing emails and zeros and ones. What is phishing? Phishing uses an innocent-looking email to entice unwary recipients to click on a deceptive link, giving hackers access to their information or a network.

In “spear-phishing,” the email is tailored to fool a specific person. An examination by The Times of the Russian operation — based on interviews with dozens of players targeted in the attack, intelligence officials who investigated it and Obama administration officials who deliberated over the best response — reveals a series of missed signals, slow responses and a continuing underestimation of the seriousness of the cyberattack.

The D.N.C.’s fumbling encounter with the F.B.I. Meant the best chance to halt the Russian intrusion was lost. The failure to grasp the scope of the attacks undercut efforts to minimize their impact. And the White House’s reluctance to respond forcefully meant the Russians have not paid a heavy price for their actions, a decision that could prove critical in deterring future cyberattacks. The low-key approach of the F.B.I. Meant that Russian hackers could roam freely through the committee’s network for nearly seven months before top D.N.C. Officials were alerted to the attack and hired cyberexperts to protect their systems.

In the meantime, the hackers moved on to targets outside the D.N.C., including Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, John D. Podesta, whose private email account was hacked months later.

Podesta, a savvy Washington insider who had written a, did not truly understand the gravity of the hacking. Charles Delavan, a Clinton campaign aide, incorrectly legitimized a phishing email sent to the personal account of John D.

Podesta, the campaign chairman. By last summer, Democrats watched in helpless fury as their private emails and confidential documents appeared online day after day — procured by Russian intelligence agents, posted on WikiLeaks and other websites, then eagerly reported on by the American media, including The Times. Trump gleefully cited many of the purloined emails on the campaign trail. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a reception last week at the Kremlin in Moscow. Credit Pool photo by Alexei Nikolsky In recent days, a skeptical president-elect, the nation’s intelligence agencies and the two major parties have become embroiled in an extraordinary public dispute over what evidence exists that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia moved beyond mere espionage to deliberately try to subvert American democracy and pick the winner of the presidential election.

Clinton’s closest aides believe that the Russian assault had a profound impact on the election, while conceding that other factors — Mrs. Clinton’s weaknesses as a candidate; her private email server; the public statements of the F.B.I. Director, James B.

Comey, about her handling of classified information — were also important. While there’s no way to be certain of the ultimate impact of the hack, this much is clear: A low-cost, high-impact weapon that Russia had test-fired in elections from Ukraine to Europe was trained on the United States, with devastating effectiveness. For Russia, with an enfeebled economy and a nuclear arsenal it cannot use short of all-out war, cyberpower proved the perfect weapon: cheap, hard to see coming, hard to trace. “There shouldn’t be any doubt in anybody’s mind,” Adm. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency and commander of United States Cyber Command, said at a postelection conference. “This was not something that was done casually, this was not something that was done by chance, this was not a target that was selected purely arbitrarily,” he said.

“This was a conscious effort by a nation-state to attempt to achieve a specific effect.” For the people whose emails were stolen, this new form of political sabotage has left a trail of shock and professional damage. Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a key Clinton supporter, recalls walking into the busy Clinton transition offices, humiliated to see her face on television screens as pundits “It was just a sucker punch to the gut every day,” Ms. “It was the worst professional experience of my life.”. Over the weekend, four prominent senators — two Republicans and two Democrats — joined forces to pledge an investigation while pointedly ignoring Mr. Trump’s skeptical claims. “Democrats and Republicans must work together, and across the jurisdictional lines of the Congress, to examine these recent incidents thoroughly and devise comprehensive solutions to deter and defend against further cyberattacks,” said Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Chuck Schumer and Jack Reed.

“This cannot become a partisan issue,” they said. “The stakes are too high for our country.” A Target for Break-Ins Sitting in the basement of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, below a wall-size 2012 portrait of a smiling Barack Obama, is a 1960s-era filing cabinet missing the handle on the bottom drawer. Only a framed newspaper story hanging on the wall hints at the importance of this aged piece of office furniture. Reads the headline from the front page of The Washington Post on June 19, 1972, with the bylines of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Andrew Brown, 37, the technology director at the D.N.C., was born after that famous break-in.

But as he began to plan for this year’s election cycle, he was well aware that the D.N.C. Could become a break-in target again. There were aspirations to ensure that the D.N.C. Was well protected against cyberintruders — and then there was the reality, Mr. Brown and his bosses at the organization acknowledged: The D.N.C.

Was a nonprofit group, dependent on donations, with a fraction of the security budget that a corporation its size would have. Advertisement “There was never enough money to do everything we needed to do,” Mr. Had a standard email spam-filtering service, intended to block phishing attacks and malware created to resemble legitimate email. But when Russian hackers started in on the D.N.C., the committee did not have the most advanced systems in place to track suspicious traffic, internal D.N.C.

Tamene, who reports to Mr. Brown and fielded the call from the F.B.I. Free Download Angst Is Not A Weltanschauung Rar Programs Free.

Agent, was not a full-time D.N.C. Employee; he works for a Chicago-based contracting firm called. He was left to figure out, largely on his own, how to respond — and even whether the man who had called in to the D.N.C. Switchboard was really an F.B.I. Thinks the D.N.C. Has at least one compromised computer on its network and the F.B.I. Wanted to know if the D.N.C.

Is aware, and if so, what the D.N.C. Is doing about it,” Mr. Tamene wrote in an internal memo about his contacts with the F.B.I. He added that “the Special Agent told me to look for a specific type of malware dubbed ‘Dukes’ by the U.S.

Intelligence community and in cybersecurity circles.” Part of the problem was that Special Agent Hawkins did not show up in person at the D.N.C. Nor could he email anyone there, as that risked alerting the hackers that the F.B.I. Knew they were in the system. An internal memo by Yared Tamene, a tech-support contractor at the D.N.C., expressed uncertainty about the identity of Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the F.B.I., who called to inform him of the breach.

Tamene’s initial scan of the D.N.C. System — using his less-than-optimal tools and incomplete targeting information from the F.B.I. — found nothing. So when Special Agent Hawkins called repeatedly in October, leaving voice mail messages for Mr. Tamene, urging him to call back, “I did not return his calls, as I had nothing to report,” Mr. Tamene explained in his memo. In November, Special Agent Hawkins called with more ominous news.

Computer was “calling home, where home meant Russia,” Mr. Tamene’s memo says, referring to software sending information to Moscow.

“SA Hawkins added that the F.B.I. Thinks that this calling home behavior could be the result of a state-sponsored attack.” Mr. Brown knew that Mr. Tamene, who declined to comment, was fielding calls from the F.B.I. But he was tied up on a different problem: evidence suggesting that the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Mrs. Clinton’s main Democratic opponent, had improperly gained access to her campaign data.

Wasserman Schultz, then the D.N.C.’s chairwoman, and Amy Dacey, then its chief executive, said in interviews that neither of them was notified about the early reports that the committee’s system had likely been compromised. Advertisement Shawn Henry, who once led the F.B.I.’s cyber division and is now president of CrowdStrike Services, the cybersecurity firm retained by the D.N.C. In April, said he was baffled that the F.B.I.

Did not call a more senior official at the D.N.C. Or send an agent in person to the party headquarters to try to force a more vigorous response. “We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana,” Mr. “We are talking about an office that is half a mile from the F.B.I. Office that is getting the notification.” “This is not a mom-and-pop delicatessen or a local library. This is a critical piece of the U.S. Infrastructure because it relates to our electoral process, our elected officials, our legislative process, our executive process,” he added.

“To me it is a high-level, serious issue, and if after a couple of months you don’t see any results, somebody ought to raise that to a higher level.” The F.B.I. Declined to comment on the agency’s handling of the hack.

Takes very seriously any compromise of public and private sector systems,” it said in a statement, adding that agents “will continue to share information” to help targets “safeguard their systems against the actions of persistent cybercriminals.” By March, Mr. Tamene and his team had met at least twice in person with the F.B.I. And concluded that Agent Hawkins was really a federal employee. But then the situation took a dire turn. A second team of Russian-affiliated hackers began to target the D.N.C. And other players in the political world, particularly Democrats. Billy Rinehart, a former D.N.C.

Halka Halka Sa Yeh Nasha Karaoke Free Download. Regional field director who was then working for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, got an odd email warning from Google.

“Someone just used your password to try to sign into your Google account,”, adding that the sign-in attempt had occurred in Ukraine. “Google stopped this sign-in attempt.

You should change your password immediately.” Mr. Rinehart was in Hawaii at the time. He remembers checking his email at 4 a.m.

For messages from East Coast associates. Without thinking much about the notification, he clicked on the “change password” button and half asleep, as best he can remember, he typed in a new password. Advertisement Hundreds of similar phishing emails were being sent to American political targets, including an identical email sent on March 19 to Mr. Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign.

Given how many emails Mr. Podesta received through this personal email account, several aides also had access to it, and one of them noticed the warning email, sending it to a computer technician to make sure it was legitimate before anyone clicked on the “change password” button. “This is a legitimate email,” Charles Delavan, to another of Mr. Podesta’s aides, who had noticed the alert. “John needs to change his password immediately.” With another click, a decade of emails that Mr.

Podesta maintained in his Gmail account — a total of about 60,000 — were unlocked for the Russian hackers. Delavan, in an interview, said that his bad advice was a result of a typo: He knew this was a phishing attack, as the campaign was getting dozens of them.

He said he had meant to type that it was an “illegitimate” email, an error that he said has plagued him ever since. Podesta, center, with Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, in Brooklyn the day after the election. Hackers gained access to tens of thousands of Mr. Podesta’s emails. Credit Dave Sanders for The New York Times During this second wave, the hackers also gained access to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then, through a virtual private network connection, to the main computer network of the D.N.C. Observed this surge of activity as well, again reaching out to Mr.

Tamene to warn him. Tamene still saw no reason to be alarmed: He found copies of the phishing emails in the D.N.C.’s spam filter. But he had no reason, he said, to believe that the computer systems had been infiltrated. One bit of progress had finally been made by the middle of April: The D.N.C., seven months after it had first been warned, finally installed a “robust set of monitoring tools,” Mr. Tamene’s internal memo says. Honing Stealthy Tactics. Advertisement Their first major attack was detected on Oct.

7, 1996, when a computer operator at the Colorado School of Mines discovered some nighttime computer activity he could not explain. The school had a major contract with the Navy, and the operator warned his contacts there.

But as happened two decades later at the D.N.C., at first “everyone was unable to connect the dots,” said, a scholar at King’s College in London who has studied the attack. Investigators gave it a name — — and spent two years, often working day and night, tracing how it hopped from the Navy to the Department of Energy to the Air Force and NASA. In the end, they concluded that the total number of files stolen, if printed and stacked, would be taller than the Washington Monument. Whole weapons designs were flowing out the door, and it was a first taste of what was to come: an escalating campaign of cyberattacks around the world. But for years, the Russians stayed largely out of the headlines, thanks to the Chinese — who took bigger risks, and often got caught. They stole the designs for the F-35 fighter jet, corporate secrets for rolling steel, even the blueprints for gas pipelines that supply much of the United States.

And during the 2008 presidential election cycle, Chinese intelligence hacked into the campaigns of Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain, making off with internal position papers and communications. But they didn’t publish any of it. The Russians had not gone away, of course. “They were just a lot more stealthy,” said, a former Air Force intelligence officer who spent most of his days fighting off Russian cyberattacks before founding Mandiant, a cybersecurity firm that is now a division of FireEye — and the company the Clinton campaign brought in to secure its own systems. The Russians were also quicker to turn their attacks to political purposes.

A 2007 cyberattack on Estonia, a former Soviet republic that had joined NATO, sent a message that Russia could paralyze the country without invading it. The next year cyberattacks were used during Russia’s war with Georgia. But American officials did not imagine that the Russians would dare try those techniques inside the United States. They were largely focused on preventing what former Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta warned was an approaching “cyber Pearl Harbor” — a shutdown of the power grid or cellphone networks. But in 2014 and 2015, a Russian hacking group began systematically targeting the State Department, the White House and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Each time, they eventually met with some form of success,” Michael Sulmeyer, a former cyberexpert for the secretary of defense, and Ben Buchanan, now both of the, wrote recently in a soon-to-be published paper for the Carnegie Endowment.

Advertisement The Russians grew stealthier and stealthier, tricking government computers into sending out data while disguising the electronic “command and control” messages that set off alarms for anyone looking for malicious actions. The State Department was so crippled that it repeatedly closed its systems to throw out the intruders. At one point, officials traveling to Vienna with Secretary of State John Kerry for the Iran nuclear negotiations had to set up commercial Gmail accounts just to communicate with one another and with reporters traveling with them.

2016 Election Hacking Coverage. Obama was briefed regularly on all this, but he made a decision that many in the White House now regret: He did not name Russians publicly, or issue sanctions. There was always a reason: fear of escalating a cyberwar, and concern that the United States needed Russia’s cooperation in negotiations over Syria. “We’d have all these circular meetings,” one senior State Department official said, “in which everyone agreed you had to push back at the Russians and push back hard. But it didn’t happen.” So the Russians escalated again — breaking into systems not just for espionage, but to publish or broadcast what they found, known as “doxing” in the cyberworld. It was a brazen change in tactics, moving the Russians from espionage to influence operations. In February 2014, between Victoria Nuland, the assistant secretary of state who handles Russian affairs and has a contentious relationship with Mr.

Putin, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the United States ambassador to Ukraine. Nuland was heard describing a little-known American effort to broker a deal in Ukraine, then in political turmoil. They were not the only ones on whom the Russians used the steal-and-leak strategy. The Open Society Foundation, run by George Soros, was a major target, and, some turned out to have been altered to make it appear as if the foundation was financing Russian opposition members. Last year, the attacks became more aggressive.

Russia hacked a major French television station, frying critical hardware. Around Christmas, it attacked part of the power grid in Ukraine, dropping a portion of the country into darkness, killing backup generators and taking control of generators. In retrospect, it was a warning shot. The attacks “were not fully integrated military operations,” Mr. Sulmeyer said. But they showed an increasing boldness. The day before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April, Ms.

Dacey, the D.N.C.’s chief executive, was preparing for a night of parties when she got an urgent phone call. With the new monitoring system in place, Mr. Tamene had examined administrative logs of the D.N.C.’s computer system and found something very suspicious: An unauthorized person, with administrator-level security status, had gained access to the D.N.C.’s computers. “Not sure it is related to what the F.B.I.

Has been noticing,” said one internal D.N.C. Email sent on April 29. May have been hacked in a serious way this week, with password theft, etc.”. No one knew just how bad the breach was — but it was clear that a lot more than a single filing cabinet worth of materials might have been taken. A secret committee was immediately created, including Ms. Wasserman Schultz, Mr.

Brown and, a former cybercrimes prosecutor at the Department of Justice who now works at Perkins Coie, the Washington law firm that handles D.N.C. Political matters. “Three most important questions,” Mr.

Sussmann wrote to his clients the night the break-in was confirmed. “1) What data was accessed? 2) How was it done? 3) How do we stop it?” Mr.

Sussmann instructed his clients not to use D.N.C. Email because they had just one opportunity to lock the hackers out — an effort that could be foiled if the hackers knew that the D.N.C. Was on to them. Advertisement The work that such companies do is a computer version of old-fashioned crime scene investigation, with fingerprints, bullet casings and DNA swabs replaced by an electronic trail that can be just as incriminating. And just as police detectives learn to identify the telltale methods of a veteran burglar, so CrowdStrike investigators recognized the distinctive handiwork of Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear.

Those are CrowdStrike’s nicknames for the two Russian hacking groups that the firm found at work inside the D.N.C. Cozy Bear — the group also known as the Dukes or A.P.T. 29, for “advanced persistent threat” — may or may not be associated with the F.S.B., the main successor to the Soviet-era K.G.B., but it is widely believed to be a Russian government operation.

It made its first appearance in 2014, said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief technology officer. It was Cozy Bear, CrowdStrike concluded, that first penetrated the D.N.C. In the summer of 2015, by sending spear-phishing emails to a long list of American government agencies, Washington nonprofits and government contractors. Whenever someone clicked on a phishing message, the Russians would enter the network, “exfiltrate” documents of interest and stockpile them for intelligence purposes. “Once they got into the D.N.C., they found the data valuable and decided to continue the operation,” said Mr.

Alperovitch, who was born in Russia and moved to the United States as a teenager. Only in March 2016 did Fancy Bear show up — first penetrating the computers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and then jumping to the D.N.C., investigators believe. Fancy Bear, sometimes called A.P.T. 28 and believed to be directed by the G.R.U., Russia’s military intelligence agency, is an older outfit, tracked by Western investigators for nearly a decade.

It was Fancy Bear that got hold of Mr. Podesta’s email. Attribution, as the skill of identifying a cyberattacker is known, is more art than science. It is often impossible to name an attacker with absolute certainty. But over time, by accumulating a reference library of hacking techniques and targets, it is possible to sp.