Apparently, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wasn’t the only Democrat the Russian government had an interest in hacking.
According to a report Tuesday morning by The Washington Post, Russian government hackers found their way into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network. There, they were able to access information about a number of Democratic candidates.
They also gained access to the DNC’s entire opposition research file on Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting, Donald Trump:
The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic, said DNC officials and the security experts.
The intrusion into the DNC was one of several targeting American political organizations. The networks of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were also targeted by Russian spies, as were the computers of some GOP political action committees, U.S. officials said. But details on those cases were not available.
A Russian Embassy spokesman said he had no knowledge of such intrusions.
DNC Chairwoman U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) put out an official statement shortly after the became public. In it, she said no donor financial information was compromised. The hack was detected in late-April, at which point some of the hackers had access for nearly a year.
“The security of our system is critical to our operation and to the confidence of the campaigns and state parties we work with,” Wasserman Schultz said. “When we discovered the intrusion, we treated this like the serious incident it is and reached out to CrowdStrike (the DNC’s internet security experts) immediately. Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network.”
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