There isn’t any secret that personal email accounts of the American officials were targeted by the Russian hackers. But, the FBI was allegedly less than attentive in giving these targets a heads-up. The Associated Press has discovered it by conducting interviews of at least 80 people. These people were part of Russian Fancy Bear team as they tried to concede since 2015, but just 2 of them were identified by the FBI. The federal agency reportedly had evidence for more than a year. The only response from the FBI officials was that they routinely notified people and organizations regarding expected threats. An unofficial source informed the AP that the FBI has been struggling to cope with the volume of potential targets and had to prioritize alerts.
The hit list was daunting with more than 500 US-based top targets, there doesn’t appear to be evidence that the FBI launched any specific effort to alert those people and organizations. There was another problem that it was hard to find if the FBI could have notified all 500 in a timely manner. It doesn’t appear to have been a coordinated attempt to try. There isn’t any specific damage actually caused by the Russian email attack. The targets had to have opened controversial links and hadn’t occupied sensitive posts for years. However, the discovery suggests that dealing with the coordinated hacking campaigns of Russia, the FBI didn’t always have a sense of urgency. The agency may not have taken them more seriously until the U.S Presidential Election 2016 which made it clear that there was a serious problem.