Lisa-Maria Neudert spoke to the BBC World Service about the leaking of confidential UK government documents on the eve of the 2019 election. She connected this leak to similar events that have occurred in the last few years:
“It’s not the first time that we’ve seen internal documents being leaked for political motivations. The first example on everyone’s mind is of course the DNC hack in the US. But we’ve also seen that in elections in the EU…”
When asked about the theory that Russian actors leaked the UK government documents, Neudert responded:
“There needs to be careful attribution work. It might be Russia, yes Russia does have that strategy in their playbook, but it could be governments, it could be private actors, it could be hacker collectives, it could be tech savvy trolling. There are many factors that are hacking private information.
This is a very politically charged environment. It’s easy to think that it must be a political motive. I think that’s likely but I think there are other possible explanations as well.”
To listen to the full investigation, visit the BBC World Service website here.
