The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced Monday that they have launched an investigation into the hacking and subsequent leak of emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

On Friday Wikileaks published an initial batch of 20,000 emails from the hack that highly embarrassed both the DNC and likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Those emails proved that the DNC had actively campaigned against Clinton rival Bernie Sanders despite its officially neutral role, as well as the organization laundering money to get around campaign limits and using racist language when describing Latino and African American voters.

Other revelations in the email leak include evidence that the DNC contrived to arrange violent protests against Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, and that the DNC actively worked with media outlets in controlling what they published, including one case where a leading political columnist was actually sending his work to them for approval before sending it to his editor.

“The FBI is investigating a cyber intrusion involving the DNC and is working to determine the nature and scope of the matter,” the agency said in a statement. “A compromise of this nature is something we take very seriously, and the FBI will continue to investigate and hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace.”

“Russian” connections

In an attempt to deflect from the damaging revelations, let alone that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is publicly saying that the next dump of information from the hack will “ensure Hillary’s arrest,” both the DNC and Clinton campaigns are claiming that the hack was orchestrated by the Russian Government to assist the Trump campaign.

That boogeyman defense, reported as fact by numerous media outlets (including those shown in the emails to be literally in the pocket of the DNC) has zero evidence at this stage other than pure speculation, and the people behind the hack may never be found either.

“Internet attack attribution is very hard, and in many cases impossible,” Resilient cyber-security expert and Chief Technology Officer Bruce Schneier told AFP. “We’ll probably never know who did this.”

What is interesting is the speed of which the FBI has launched its investigation, given that at the time of writing there is no investigation into the serious revelations in the emails released so far, and that it’s the same FBI who also let Clinton off for breaching national security by using a private email server to send and receive top-secret Government documents.

Expect to hear more about the hack particularly as it’s likely Wikileaks will drop more emails later in the week.

Image credit: CSPAN/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain CC 0