Polish senior official's emails hacked by Russians, website claims
The hackers who disclosed emails from a private mailbox owned by a Polish top official are likely Russian although they pretend to be Poles, the Wirtualna Polska (WP) news portal claims, citing its own investigation and 'talks' with the hackers.
"A journalist from Wirtualna Polska managed to talk to people who post emails from Michal Dworczyk's mailbox online," the website wrote on Tuesday. "They claim to be Poles, but an analysis of their statements shows that they are Russian speakers."
Dworczyk is the head of the prime minister's office and the government's vaccination commissioner. Allegedly, he used a private email account for formal or semi-formal correspondence, although he claims no sensitive issues have been raised in the emails.
"There are many indications that Russian military services are behind this operation," WP quoted Piotr Pytel, a former head of the Military Counterintelligence Service, as saying.
The first emails from Dworczyk's mailbox were posted on the ‘Confidential Conversation’ channel on the Telegram messenger on June 4.
A few days later, Onet, a WP competitor, was the first to report on the account, and soon after all Polish media were writing about the emails revealed on the channel.
To date, no one has challenged the authenticity of Dworczyk's correspondence, WP wrote.
"It was through the leaks that Poles were able to read the correspondence between Michal Dworczyk, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, several ministers, many of the prime minister's advisers, military officers and administrative employees," WP went on to say.
On June 9, a journalist from WP sent a message to the administrator of the ‘Confidential Conversation’ channel, but the contact broke off soon afterwards.
Then, on July 7, WP received answers to 12 questions it had sent to the hackers.
"Although the authors introduced themselves as Poles, it was obvious at a glance that the answer, which was exactly 572 words long, was written by a person for whom Polish was not the first language," WP writes in its report. "And even a person who had only superficial contact with Russian... could realise that the author... came from somewhere beyond the eastern border."
"For three weeks, we consulted the statements of the ‘Confidential Conversation’ administrator with several Russian language translators, with linguists, with analysts dealing with Russia and Eastern Europe and with intelligence officers working on the eastern regions," WP continued.
"Almost all of them requested anonymity due to the seriousness of the topic," the portal added.
"In a text of 3,852 characters, our experts found 37 errors, borrowings and expressions pointing to Russian as the author's mother tongue. Linguists and translators immediately noticed the poor Polish in the answers they (the administrators - PAP) sent us," WP reported.
According to Pytel, the hack was a joint Belarusian-Russian operation. "At the same time, it has been controlled and supervised by the GRU (Russian military intelligence - PAP), as this service has the appropriate means to conduct information operations on this scale," Pytel was quoted as saying. (PAP)
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