DNC Hacker: “wustl-2.0” Was Too Spotty to Hack

The hacker responsible for the leaking of private Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 election, known online as “Guccifer 2.0,” was in the news again this week when it surfaced that they had been working on behalf of the Russian state. In a series of emails exchanged with WUnderground, Guccifer 2.0 disclosed that they had also been interested in hacking Washington University servers during the presidential debate held on the WUSTL campus in October of 2016. However, in a development that astounded the highly seasoned and elite Russian state hacker, the network “wustl-2.0” was never active for long enough to be successfully infiltrated.

In an encrypted message, the hacker wrote that he was “shocked by the frequency with which ‘wustl-2.0’ and the other campus networks were completely offline. I had never seen anything like it.” Using the most efficient network penetration methods on a server much less sophisticated than that of the DNC, Guccifer was nonetheless thwarted by the constant failures that WUSTL students have come to expect and learned to budget time for.

When given the opportunity to review this piece for accuracy, Guccifer pointed out its author’s obvious dearth of technical knowledge and expressed mild irritation at the meta joke earlier in this sentence. In a final note, they clarified, “So you really pay $70,000 a year for this stuff?”