Alisa Shevchenko has been put on the US Government sanctions list.
Alisa Shevchenko has been put on the US Government sanctions list.
A young Russian woman has been placed on a sanction list by the White House for supposedly helping Vladimir Putin to interfere in the US election.
Alisa Shevchenko is a skilled hacker employed by big businesses to track down weaknesses in their online security.
Her company was a surprise inclusion on a sanctions list released by the US government last week amid paranoia over alleged Russian meddling in Donald Trump's presidential election win, the Daily Mail reports.
The only information on the fact sheet said that the company - named ZOR - provided the Russian Federation's foreign intelligence service "with technical research and development".
However she hit back at the company's inclusion on the list, claiming she had never knowingly carried out work for the Russian government.
In encrypted emails to The Guardian, the hacker claimed the White House may have been tricked by "counterfeit in order to frame my company" or had simply "misinterpreted the facts".
Donald Trump has ignored an intelligence report claiming Vladimir Putin influenced the election to help him win. Photo / AP
Shevchenko said: "A young female hacker and her helpless company seems like a perfect pick for that goal. I don't try to hide, I travel a lot, and am a friendly communicative person.
"And most importantly, I don't have any big money, power or connections behind me to shrug off the blame. So really, it could be anyone."
She also mocked the "insane level of hysteria around the entire 'Russian hacking' story".
Donald Trump has ignored an intelligence report claiming Vladimir Putin influenced the election to help him win.
The US president-elect insisted Russian hacking had "no effect" on the outcome of the race for the White House and dismissed suggestions voting machines had been tampered with.
He made the strongly-worded denial just 10 minutes after he met with intelligence chiefs to discuss meddling by the Kremlin.
A classified report stated that Vladimir Putin "ordered" a stealth influence campaign last year aimed at influencing the US presidential election. Photo / AP
The classified report he was shown stated that Putin "ordered" a stealth influence campaign last year aimed at influencing the US presidential election.
The official finding of the NSA, FBI and CIA is that Putin "ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election".
"Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency," it says.
The report says Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow's long-standing desire to undermine "the US-led liberal democratic order, the promotion of which Putin and other senior Russian leaders view as a threat to Russia and Putin's regime."
After his briefing, Trump didn't embrace the report's central finding that Russia was behind the cyber intrusions.
The intelligence assessment made no mention of a separate hacking attack on a Gmail account belonging to John Podesta, who chaired Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful presidential campaign.
Clinton complained during a post-election party in December that Putin had a "personal beef" against her stemming from her criticism of the elections that brought him to power.
