Whoopsie: Russian hackers post same document twice, but with glaring differences

Often, in war, mistakes are made. Sometimes, in Russia’s information war against the West, mistakes are made and then published for all the world to see.

That seems to be what happened when two supposedly independent hacking groups, believed by security experts to have ties to the Kremlin, posted the same documents stolen from a philanthropy run by George Soros. But the hack included a twist: Some of the documents taken by one group were altered in a bid to try and link Soros to Russian anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, revealing how hackers likely working for Moscow are editing documents to smear their victims.

After hackers broke into a system for sharing documents at Soros’ Open Society Foundations, material describing the organization’s work in Russia appeared on two different sites: in November on the web platform of CyberBerkut, a pro-Russian hacking group that opposes Ukraine’s current government, and in June on DCLeaks.com, a website that hosts purloined documents and is believed by security researchers to be a Russian project.

Among the documents posted, at least three appear on both sites. The documents posted by CyberBerkut have been edited to try and show that Open Society provides significant financial support to Navalny.

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/News/12147705/story.html