The gripping story of the DNC hackby digby
This is your long-read assignment of the week-end. You don’t have to read it all now, but I urge you to read the whole thing at some point. If you want to understand the Russian hacking story, this is an important addition to the body of knowledge. This is an excerpt:
The Clinton campaign was no easy target; several former employees said the organization put particular stress on digital safety.
Work emails were protected by two-factor authentication, a technique that uses a second passcode to keep accounts secure. Most messages were deleted after 30 days and staff went through phishing drills. Security awareness even followed the campaigners into the bathroom, where someone put a picture of a toothbrush under the words: “You shouldn’t share your passwords either.”
Two-factor authentication may have slowed the hackers, but it didn’t stop them. After repeated attempts to break into various staffers’ hillaryclinton.com accounts, the hackers turned to the personal Gmail addresses. It was there on March 19 that they targeted top Clinton lieutenants — including campaign manager Robby Mook, senior adviser Jake Sullivan and political fixer Philippe Reines.
A malicious link was generated for Podesta at 11:28 a.m. Moscow time, the AP found. Documents subsequently published by WikiLeaks show that the rogue email arrived in his inbox six minutes later. The link was clicked twice.
Podesta’s messages — at least 50,000 of them — were in the hackers’ hands.
Though the heart of the campaign was now compromised, the hacking efforts continued. Three new volleys of malicious messages were generated on the 22nd, 23rd and 25th of March, targeting communications director Jennifer Palmieri and Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, among others.
The torrent of phishing emails caught the attention of the FBI, which had spent the previous six months urging the Democratic National Committee in Washington to raise its shield against suspected Russian hacking. In late March, FBI agents paid a visit to Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, where they were received warily, given the agency’s investigation into the candidate’s use of a private email server while secretary of state.
Signs posted in a bathroom at Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn were put up to remind campaign workers to keep their computers and passwords secure. (AP Photo/Julie Pace)
The phishing messages also caught the attention of Secureworks, a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, which had been following Fancy Bear, whom Secureworks codenamed Iron Twilight.
Fancy Bear had made a critical mistake.
It fumbled a setting in the Bitly link-shortening service that it was using to sneak its emails past Google’s spam filter. The blunder exposed whom they were targeting.
It was late March when Secureworks discovered the hackers were going after Democrats.
“As soon as we started seeing some of those hillaryclinton.com email addresses coming through, the DNC email addresses, we realized it’s going to be an interesting twist to this,” said Rafe Pilling, a senior security researcher with Secureworks.
By early April Fancy Bear was getting increasingly aggressive, the AP found. More than 60 bogus emails were prepared for Clinton campaign and DNC staffers on April 6 alone, and the hackers began hunting for Democrats beyond New York and Washington, targeting the digital communications director for Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and a deputy director in the office of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
The group’s hackers seemed particularly interested in Democratic officials working on voter registration issues: Pratt Wiley, the DNC’s then-director of voter protection, had been targeted as far back as October 2015 and the hackers tried to pry open his inbox as many as 15 times over six months.
I keep hearing people saying that this had nothing to do with the Russians trying to help Donald Trump. The fact that they only did this to Democrats would seem to indicate otherwise.
Anyway, read it all when you have time. It’s actually quite a gripping story. And it’s totally depressing that the Republicans in congress are so corrupt, stupid or confused that they are going to do everything they can to make sure it happens again.
What was it they used to call that? Objectively pro-fascist? Something like that.
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