Possible hacks in computers linked to the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton and other intrusions in Democratic Party organizations’ systems are under investigation by the FBI and Justice, as reported by officials on Friday.
Campaign’s representatives stated that the internal systems were not affected by the intrusions after cyber security experts made some reviews of the status of the system. The DNC uses several systems to plan and execute the activities and investigation related to the campaign, including analytics data programs which have been possibly hacked. The program was maintained by the DNC, and it’s used by several entities to develop statistic research linked to the campaign.
According to Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton’s campaign, all computer systems used by the Democratic National Committee are under supervision by security experts and cyber professionals, who detected some irregularities in the security standards that revealed a possible intrusion.
This is not the first time
Other intrusions have been detected in the past. Some Democratic party organizations have had system breaches regarding cyber security. The major case was a security breach in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s system.
That case was already under investigation by authorities from the Justice Department’s national security division. They have found certain patterns in that case that are similar to the newest reports of intrusions in the data analytics program.
So far, the only relevant detail revealed by the authorities was that Russian intelligence might be involved. The breach apparently existed for five days, which allowed hackers to access data to the analytics program’ for a considerable amount of time.
The system is a dynamic voter database, and it contains mainly data linked to voter participation. The most sensitive data contained in the system was voter’s contact information. All the data is used to plan campaign activities and develop key contacts with voters.
“An analytics data program maintained by the DNC, and used by ourcampaing and a number of other entities, was accessed as part of the DNC hack. Our campaign computer system has been under review by outside cyber security experts. To date, they have found no evidence that our internal systems have been compromised,” said the DNC in a email.
A major leak in the DNC
Thousands of Democratic National Committee emails were leaked. It was considered as a severe security breach and produced a tense climate in the party, forcing the chairwoman Debbie Wasserman to resign.
The 20,000 emails published on WikiLeaks revealed certain support received by Clinton at the beginning of the campaign when Bernie Sanders was still in the race.
Julian Assange stated that more documents linked to the presidential campaigns are under the domain of WikiLeak. He did not announce who was responsible for the hack.
This is the proof that Democratic Party organizations and private companies linked to the party may be an important target for hackers and foreign intelligence agencies.
The response of the Russian intelligence agency denied involvement with the DNC hack, although the FBI confirmed that the attack was produced in Russian territory.
Source: CNN