Russian hackers breach DNC emails, but who cares?

With all the heated news about the political race and the current Democratic National Convention, there’s a lot of finger pointing regarding the emails that were posted to WikiLeaks about the apparent preference the DNC had toward the opponent of Bernie Sanders. Nearly 20,000 emails were disclosed that indicate that the Democratic National Convention committee favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was served a class action lawsuit for fraud to position Hillary Clinton as the nominee before any votes were cast, misrepresentation to support the notion of fraud, deceptive conduct on an apparent perception of neutrality, retribution for monetary donations to the Bernie Sanders campaign, an allegation that the DNC broke its fiduciary duties by not having a fair election process, and negligence on behalf of the DNC.

Now it’s been revealed by numerous US officials and cybersecurity experts that the Russians did it. Why? Geography points to Russia: one of the hacker groups stopped working on Russian holidays. A digital footprint was left in Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet. Forensic evidence points to proxy groups located in Russia. They also have a historical beef with US intelligence–but we already know that.

Of course, there may be a motive as well directly from Russian leadership. Vladimir Putin would much rather have Donald Trump in the White House over Hillary Clinton. The timing couldn’t have been better; the leak was timed on the heels of the convention.

But why bother with the research? At the end of the day, does it matter if Russia hacked the DNC? No one is disputing the actual emails–unless, of course, it’s worth finding out if Trump and Putin collaborated.

Still, it’s interesting that WikiLeaks is taking everything at face value and no one is disputing the authenticity of the emails. If logic would have it, it shouldn’t matter who did it. It matters what’s in those emails. And those emails are damaging indeed.

Let’s focus on hardening email security, because clearly there’s a tremendous need for that. There’s no reason to bicker over contents of emails or where they came from. It’s more important to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

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