The inside story of how Fancy Bear hacked the Democrats’ emails

A reconstruction of events shows how hackers targeted Hillary Clinton’s campaign and stole John Podesta’s emails in March 2016.

It was just before noon in Moscow on March 10, 2016, when the first volley of malicious messages hit the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The first 29 phishing emails were almost all misfires. Addressed to people who worked for Mrs Clinton during her first presidential run in 2008, the messages bounced back untouched.

Except one.

Within nine days, some of the campaign’s most consequential secrets would be in the hackers’ hands, part of a massive operation aimed at vacuuming up millions of messages from thousands of inboxes across the world.

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