It shouldn't be news that nothing on computers can be considered private. NASA's most secure files were hacked at least 13 times in 2011 alone.
7/28/16, "FBI warned Clinton campaign last spring of cyberattack," Michael Isikoff, Yahoo News
"The
FBI warned the Clinton campaign that it was a target of a cyberattack
last March, just weeks before the Democratic National Committee
discovered it had been penetrated by hackers it now believes were
working for Russian intelligence, two sources who have been briefed on
the matter told Yahoo News.
In
a meeting with senior officials at the campaign’s Brooklyn
headquarters, FBI agents laid out concerns that cyberhackers had used
so-called spear-phishing emails as part of an attempt to penetrate the
campaign’s computers, the sources said. One of the sources said agents
conducting a national security investigation asked the Clinton campaign
to turn over internal computer logs as well as the personal email
addresses of senior campaign officials.
But the campaign, through its
lawyers, declined to provide the data, deciding that the FBI’s request
for sensitive personal and campaign information data was too broad and
intrusive, the source said.
A
second source who had been briefed on the matter and who confirmed the
Brooklyn meeting said agents provided no specific information to the
campaign about the identity of the cyberhackers or whether they were
associated with a foreign government. The source said the campaign was
already aware of attempts to penetrate its computers and had taken steps
to thwart them, emphasizing that there is still no evidence that the
campaign’s computers had actually been successfully penetrated.
But
the potential that the intruders were associated with a foreign
government should have come as no surprise to the Clinton campaign, said
several sources knowledgeable about the investigation. Chinese
intelligence hackers were widely reported to have penetrated both the
campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008.
The
Brooklyn warning also could raise new questions about why the campaign
and the DNC didn’t take the matter more seriously. It came just four
months after the DNC had also been contacted by FBI agents alerting its
information technology specialists about a cyberattack on its computers,
the sources told Yahoo News. As with the warning to the Clinton
campaign, the FBI initially provided no details to the DNC.
As
Yahoo News first reported this week, in early May a DNC consultant who
was investigating Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s work for
pro-Putin political figures in Ukraine alerted senior committee
officials that she had been notified by Yahoo security that her personal
email account had been targeted by “state-sponsored actors.” The DNC
had already realized that it was the victim of a serious breach, but the
red flag from the staffer prompted committee security officials to
conclude for the first time that the suspected cyberhackers were likely
associated with the Russian government.
By mid-May, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper was telling reporters that US. Intelligence officials “already had some indications” of hacks into political campaigns that were likely linked to foreign governments and that “we’ll probably have more.”
In
a talk at the Aspen Security Forum Thursday, Clapper said the U.S.
government is not “quite ready yet” to “make a public call” on who was
behind the cyberassault on the DNC, but he suggested one of “the usual
suspects” is likely to blame. “We don’t know enough [yet] to…ascribe a
motivation, regardless of who it may have been,” Clapper said.
Clapper’s
comments come amid a mounting debate within the Obama administration
about whether to publicly blame the Russian government for the
cyberattack on the DNC. (A senior law enforcement official told Yahoo
News that the Russians were “most probably” involved in the cyberattack,
but cautioned that the investigation is ongoing.) On Wednesday, Sen.
Dianne Feinstein of California and California Rep. Adam Schiff, the
ranking Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, wrote
President Obama calling for a stern response, asserting that if the
accounts of Russian involvement are true, “It would represent an
unprecedented attempt to meddle in American domestic politics.”
But
Clapper is reportedly among a number of U.S. intelligence officials who
have resisted calls to publicly blame the Russians, viewing it as
likely the kind of activity that most intelligence agencies engage in. “[I’m] taken aback a bit by…the hyperventilation over this,” Clapper
said during his Aspen appearance, adding in a sarcastic tone, “I’m
shocked somebody did some hacking. That’s never happened before.”
The
confirmation that the campaign was warned by the FBI as early as March
of an attempted breach of its computers is a further indication that the
scope of the possible Russian attack may have been far wider and
extensive than the official DNC accounts.
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