Guccifer

Marcel Lehel Lazăr (born ), known as Guccifer, is a Romanian hacker responsible for high-level computer security breaches in the U.S. and Romania. Lazăr targeted celebrities, Romanian and U.S. government officials and other prominent persons.

Lazăr first appeared in news media in February 2013 after the website The Smoking Gun reported he was responsible for hacking the AOL account of Dorothy Bush Koch, sister of former president George W. Bush. Family photos of former president George H. W. Bush, who was in the hospital at the time, were circulated to the internet. He also circulated a self-portrait painted by George W. Bush. Lazăr went on to hack a number of AOL, Yahoo!, Flickr, and Facebook accounts, giving him access to information about current and former high-level government officials.

In January 2014, Lazăr was jailed in his native Romania for seven years after being convicted of hacking emails of Romanian officials. Lazăr was subsequently extradited by Romania to the United States, where he was indicted on federal charges. In May 2016, Lazăr pleaded guilty in federal court to two charges. In September 2016, he was sentenced to 52 months in prison in the United States. Romanian authorities asked for Lazăr to be released to his home nation to complete his seven-year prison sentence there before being returned to the U.S. to serve his federal prison sentence. He lived in the village of Sâmbăteni, part of the Păuliș commune, to the east of Arad, Romania.

Lazăr had no particular computer expertise, but instead used patience and persistence to obtain private information. Through six months of trial and error, Lazăr guessed the password of Romanian politician Corina Crețu and gained access to her correspondence with Powell. as well as the brother of Barbara Bush, CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz, and former Miss Maine Patricia Legere.

On March 20, 2013, USA Today reported that Lazăr had successfully hacked the e-mail account of Sidney Blumenthal, a former aide to former president Bill Clinton. He distributed private memos from Blumenthal to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton involving then-recent events in Libya, including the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attack. Before distributing the memos, he copied and pasted the text into his own new documents, then reformatted them with pink backgrounds and Comic Sans font.

In early May 2013, Lazăr hacked into online accounts owned by two members of the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as accounts owned by Adam Posen and his wife and another owned by a former Federal Reserve Board official.

TSG reported on May 7, 2013, that Lazăr had hacked the Twitter feed and e-mail account of Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell.

In 2014, a Romanian court sentenced Lazăr to four years in jail for accessing email accounts of public figures "with the aim of getting ... confidential data."

Lazăr already had a police record in Romania, having been arrested and convicted there in 2011 for "hacking into the email accounts of Romanian starlets and other celebrities" under the pseudonym Micul Fum ("Little Smoke").

The indictment alleged that: quote|From December 2012 to January 2014, [Lazăr] hacked into the email and social media accounts of high-profile victims, including a family member of two former U.S. presidents, a former U.S. Cabinet member, a former member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former presidential advisor. After gaining unauthorized access to their email and social media accounts, [Lazăr] publicly released his victims' private email correspondence, medical and financial information, and personal photographs. The indictment also alleges that in July and August 2013, [Lazăr] impersonated a victim after compromising the victim's account. in Alexandria, Virginia.

Claim regarding Hillary Clinton email server

In May 2016—one month after being extradited to the U.S., and while jailed in Virginia awaiting trial—Guccifer claimed to have repeatedly hacked Hillary Clinton's email server. This claim occurred in the midst of an ongoing FBI probe of Clinton's use of a private email server while serving as United States Secretary of State. Lazăr claimed that the server was "like an open orchid on the Internet" and that "it was easy ... easy for me, for everybody." U.S. officials have also said that if Lazăr had obtained information from Clinton's servers, he would have publicly released such information, as he did when he obtained access to other high-profile individuals, and George W. Bush. According to an FBI report, Lazăr stated during interrogation that he had lied to FOX News when claiming he hacked Clinton's e-mail server, and investigators determined that although he may have attempted to access the server, no additional solid forensic evidence was found to tie Lazăr to this failed access attempt.

Guilty plea on U.S. charges On May 25, 2016, Lazăr—then age 44—pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to unauthorized access to a protected computer and aggravated identity theft as part of a plea agreement with federal prosecutors.

According to a Justice Department press release:

quote|In a statement of facts filed with his plea agreement, [Lazăr] admitted that from at least October 2012 to January 2014, he intentionally gained unauthorized access to personal email and social media accounts belonging to approximately 100 Americans, and he did so to unlawfully obtain his victims' personal information and email correspondence. His victims included an immediate family member of two former U.S. presidents, a former member of the U.S. Cabinet, a former member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former presidential advisor, he admitted. [Lazăr] admitted that in many instances, he released his victims' private email correspondence, medical and financial information and personal photographs.