A woman has been arrested and charged over the leak of National Security Agency documents that allege that Russia’s GRU military intelligence unit attempted to hack local government election officials.

Reality Leigh Winner (pictured), a 25-year-old federal contractor from Atlanta, has been charged with violating federal laws that prohibit the distribution of classified defense information. Winner worked at a company called Pluribus International Corp. that provides defense and intelligence contracting services to the federal government, including the NSA.

The leaked documents included a report that claims that Russia’s GRU hacked into an election-related hardware and software vendor and then used the data obtained to launch at least two spear phishing campaigns, which attempt to fool people into thinking an email came from someone they know.

The targets were some 122 local government election officials, including one case that targeted officials who deal with absentee ballots. The report does not state whether the campaign had any effect on the election’s outcome and notes that much remains unknown about the extent of the hackers’ accomplishments. The report also said there was an attack on Aug. 24 on an American company that sells voter registration software “evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions.”

Winner, who seems to have been motivated to leak the documents based on political hatred of the current administration, was exposed as the hacker by the very site to which she leaked the documents: Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept. As first explained by Erratta Security, the leaked documents published by The Intercept included PDF scans of printed pages, including the security microdots printed by the printer used by Winner.

While not widely known, all printers print microdots, a process called printer steganography, that includes encoded printer serial numbers and timestamps to allow government agencies to track where a document was printed. In this case, the published documents from Winter included data that indicated that a printer with model number 54, serial number 29535218 printed the document on May 9, 2017, at 6:20, making it dead easy for the NSA to track down who was using the printer at the time.

According to the Department of Justice, Winner has admitted to intentionally identifying and printing the classified intelligence report, removing the classified intelligence report from her office space, retaining it and mailing it to The Information. Winner, who is facing the charge of “gathering, transmitting or losing defense information” contained under Chapter 37 of the federal law: espionage and censorship with a maximum sentence of 10 years, remains in custody after an initial court appearance earlier Monday.

Photo: Reality Winner/Twitter