Guccifer

About

Guccifer is the online pseudonym of Marcel Lehel Lazar, a Romanian computer hacker who gained online notoriety for conducting a series of high-profile cyberattacks aimed at approximately 100 American public figures, including family members of two former U.S. presidents and several members of the U.S. Cabinet, the White House Office and the Joint Chief of Staff, as well as dozens of Romanian government officials and celebrities.

Online History

Aside from The Smoking Gun's description of the hacker as male who goes by the pseudonym Guccifer, presumably a portmanteu of "Gucci" and "Lucifer," little is known about his identity or location.

February 2013: The Bush Family

On February 7th, 2013, The Smoking Gun^[1] reported that a hacker calling himself "Guccifer" posted photos and email exchanges taken from the email accounts of several family members of former President George W. Bush, including his sister Dorothy Bush Koch. Among the photographs were self-portraits of Bush taking a bath and shower (shown below, left). On March 21st, Gawker^[2] released images of six additional paintings by Bush (shown below, right).

Guccifer reportedly told the Smoking Gun that the federal government had been investigating him for some time and that he was not worried about being caught, adding "i have an old game with the fucking bastards inside, this is just another chapter in the game."

March 2013: General Colin Powell

On March 11th, 2013, The Smoking Gun^[6] reported that Guccifer hacked the Facebook account of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, where he proceeded to post several status updates insulting George W. Bush (shown below). The same day, Powell posted a status update^[4] that the hacking problem had been fixed after working with Facebook.

On March 13th, The Smoking Gun^[5] published an article revealing that Powell's AOL e-mail account had been compromised by Guccifer as well, who was able to access Powell's personal financial documents and communications with several former government officials.

March 2013: White House Adviser Sidney Blumenthal

On March 15th, 2013, The Smoking Gun^[7] reported that Guccifer had managed to break into the AOL email account of Sidney Blumenthal, a senior White House adviser to former President Bill Clinton. In the account, Guccifer obtained many emails between Blumenthal and Hilary Clinton, among other correspondences with Washington insiders. The article also mentioned that Guccifer left a message regarding the purported secret society known as the "Illuminati".

“the evil is leading this fucked up world!!!!!! i tell you this the world of tomorrow will be a world free of illuminati or will be no more,”

On March 18th, The Smoking Gun^[8] published a follow-up article about several confidential memos Guccifer discovered in Blumenthal's email account, which he disseminated to hundreds of recipients. The memos referenced several incidents in Libya, including an attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi on September 11th, 2012 (shown below). To distribute the messages, Guccifer pasted them into a new document using the Comic Sans font. The article also reported that two IP addresses connected with the hacker had been traced to Russia and several emails containing the Blumenthal memos were distributed to Russian reporters.

March 2013: Former White House Chief of Staff Kenneth Duberstein

On March 22nd, The Smoking Gun^[14] reported that Guccifer breached a new batch of AOL e-mail accounts belonging to several Washington D.C. insiders, including former President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein, former military advisor and chairman of the defense contrator VizorNetMark Gatanas and public relations executive Fraser Seitel. According to the article, the hacker corroborated his latest claims by forwarding screen captures of e-mail correspondences between the targets and other high-ranking officials.

May 2013: Sex & The City Author Candace Bushnell

On May 6th, 2013, Guccifer infiltrated American author Candice Bushnell's e-mail account and obtained a partial manuscript of the Sex and The City author's upcoming novel titled Killing Monica that she had sent to her editor at Grand Central Publishing. The 37,000-words document was then converted into 50 screen-captured images and uploaded via Google Drive (shown below, left).^[11] Guccifer also took control of the author's Twitter account and shared a link to the Google Drive page with her 9,100 followers, effectively leaking the manuscript out in the open (shown below, right).

On the following day, The Smoking Gun^[12] and Gawker^[13] reported on Guccifer's latest exploit, the former of which citing an e-mail allegedly sent from the hacker himself. Bushnell also confirmed the breach of her accounts and revealed that a similar attempt were made on her Facebook account from an IP address in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Later that same day, the elusive hacker uploaded two additional screenshots of Bushnell's panicked e-mail correspondence with the editors to the same Google Drive page.

May 2013: NIC Chairman Christopher Kojm

On May 28th, The Smoking Gun revealed that the chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council (NIC) Christopher Kojm’s personal MSN account has been breached by Guccifer, who once again backed up his claim with screengrabs from his account. According to the report, Guccifer claims to have gained access to Kojm's personal correspondence, his banking information, documents relating to Obama's interim cabinet and e-mail exchanges with 9/11 Commission members and staff, though it didn't clarify whether the hacker was able to access any classified intelligence information from Kojm’s account.

June 2013: NNSA Administrator Neile Miller

On June 12th, amidst the aftermath of the NSA surveillance scandal, The Smoking Gun^[15] reported that Guccifer recently breached personal e-mail and Facebook accounts of Neile Miller, the acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) which oversees the maintenance of the country's nuclear stockpile. The article also included a photograph of Miller with Obama at a White House meeting in 2012 (shown below), noting that it was forwarded to the publication by Guccifer, however, no evidence was found to suggest the hacker accessed any sensitive or classified documents from her accounts, citing a statement released by Miller through an NNSA spokesperson.

July 2013: Ex-DIA Official Roy Apseloff

On July 11th, Gawker^[16] revealed that it has received a cache of personal documents and correspondences belonging to Roy Apseloff, a now-retired veteran official of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in an e-mail sent from Guccifer. Among the leaked documents that were published includes an appraisal of Apseloff's home, a photograph of Apseloff and Arnold Schwarzenegger and an unknown volume of e-mail correspondences detailing sexually explicit messages.

According to Gawker, Apseloff had held several high-ranking positions throughout his 32-year career with the agency, most notably as the director of the National Media Exploitation Center to oversee the analysis of intercepted documents for intelligence use.

The Guccifer Archive

On January 6th, 2014, The Smoking Gun^[17] ran one of the most comprehensive summaries of Guccifer's exploits it has ever published to date, citing newly-obtained documents that it had obtained via e-mail from the mysterious hacker himself. According to the article, the archive included documents of personal financial records, photographs, contact information and online storage locations that had been illegally obtained from dozens of "entertainers, scholars, diplomats, financiers, government and military officials." The article also added that the hacker decided to share his archive amidst growing concerns of being caught, citing:

“i don’t know what near future hold for me,” the hacker stated, adding that the thousands of documents were being provided to a reporter “in case I disappear.” Aware that a platoon of federal agents is hunting for him (or her or them), “Guccifer” facetiously claimed to be having dreams “in which a woman is stepping up to me saying that she is from Federal Bureau and I am busted.” He added, “meanwhile me trying desperately to erase my files on my computer at my desk or on my smartphone which btw I don't have because I can't afford one.”

Investigation

On January 7th, 2014, the Romanian domestic intelligence agency Serviciul Român de Informaţii (SRI) announced^[19] that it has launched an investigation to capture and prosecute the mysterious hacker in the wake of the revelation that Guccifer had hacked into the Yahoo email account of the agency's director George Maior.^[18]

Arrest

On January 22nd, 2014, the Romanian authorities arrested Marcel Lehel Lazăr, a 40-year-old Romanian national and former cab driver who lives in Arad, and identified him as the suspect hacker behind Guccifer. (shown below).

According to Romania Insider,^[21] the raid and the arrest were made possible as a result of a collaboration between the Romanian authorities and American intelligence agencies. On the same day, Gawker^[20] published an article about Lazar's arrest, noting that the man had been previously convicted of hacking-related charges against dozens of Romanian officials in February of 2012.

Conviction in Romania

On June 6th, 2014, a Romanian court sentenced Lazar to four years of imprisonment, as well as a fine of 11000 Romanian Leu (approximately £2,020) in legal costs to the state, after finding him guilty of illegally hacking into the e-mail accounts of numerous individuals, including the Romanian Intelligence Service director George Maior, Member of European Parliament Corina Cretu and many others. In addition to the four-year jail term, Lazar also faces a separate term of up to three years in prison as he had previously received a suspended sentence for hacking charges in 2012.

Indictment in the United States

On June 12th, 2014, Lazar was indicted in absentia by a federal grand jury in the United States District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, on a total of nine felony charges: three counts of wire fraud, three counts of unauthorized access to protected computers, aggravated identity theft, cyberstalking and obstruction of justice. The indictment alleged that, between December 2012 and January 2014, Lazar gained unauthorized access to email and social media accounts of high-profile American public figures and illegally distributed their private information online, including personal correspondences, medical and financial records, as well as personal photographs.

Extradition to the United States

In March 2016, nearly two years after Lazar was tried, convicted and sentenced to a four-year jail term by the Romanian courts, Lazar was handed over to the United States authorities and processed into a prison facility in Alexandria, Virginia. On April 1st, 2016, Guccifer made his first appearance in the United States court.

Clinton Email Server Hack Claim

On May 4th, 2016, while waiting for trial under custody in the United States, Lazar participated in an exclusive interview with Fox News^[29] in which he claimed to have hacked Hillary Clinton's unsecured email server during her tenure as United States Secretary of State in 2013. In response, the national press secretary for Clinton's presidential campaign released a statement arguing that Lazar's claims were baseless:

"There is absolutely no basis to believe the claims made by this criminal from his prison cell. In addition to the fact he offers no proof to support his claims, his descriptions of Secretary Clinton's server are inaccurate. It is unfathomable that he would have gained access to her emails and not leaked them the way he did to his other victims."

The following day, NBC News^[24] published another interview with Guccifer, in which he referred to the email server as "an open orchid on the internet." The Federal Bureau of Investigation dismissed the claims, saying there is no evidence of the security breach. In the coming days, posts about the story reached the front page of the /r/politics^[25][26] and /r/The_Donald^[27] subreddits.

Conviction in the United States

On May 25th, 2016, Lehel pleaded guilty to the charges of gaining unauthorized access to protected computers and aggravated identity theft as part of a plea agreement with the U.S. Justice Department. That day, a post about the story reached the front page of the /r/politics^[28] subreddit. On September 1st, 2016, as a result of his guilty plea on two charges, Lehel was sentenced to 52 months in prison by a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia.

Impact

Guccifer 2.0

In June 2016, not long after Marcel Lehel Lazar (a.k.a Guccifer) and the U.S. Justice Department reached a guilty plea deal, an anonymous hacker, or a group of hackers, who goes by the handle "Guccifer 2.0" began releasing batches of massive internal data and correspondences obtained from the servers of least two major committees within the United States Democratic Party, namely the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which quickly resulted in a major political scandal surrounding the ethical conducts of the party's leadership during the caucuses. According to the hacker's statements in interviews and on his website, Guccifer 2.0 claims to be a lone hacker of Romanian nationality, though several American cybersecurity experts have speculated that the pseudonym may have been devised as a decoy to conceal the link between the Russian government and the cyberattacks.

Search Interest

External References