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Financial details about Democrat donors purported to be from DNC computers were published in June 2016 by Guccifer 2.0.. This kind of information, assuming it's authentic, could be used by injured parties as grounds to sue the DNC since it knowingly disregarded warnings about security shortcomings on its computers.
7/27/2016, "Democrats Ignored Cybersecurity Warnings Before Theft," Bloomberg, Michael Riley
"The Democratic National Committee was warned last fall (2015) that its
computer network was susceptible to attacks but didn’t follow the
security advice it was given, according to three people familiar with
the matter....
Computer security
consultants hired by the DNC made dozens of recommendations after a
two-month review, the people said. Following the advice, which would
typically include having specialists hunt for intruders on the network,
might have alerted party officials that hackers had been lurking in
their network for weeks--hackers who would stay for nearly a year.
Instead, officials didn’t discover the breach until April (2016). The theft ultimately led to the release of almost 20,000 internal e-mails through WikiLeaks last week on the eve of the convention....
Cyber-security assessments can be a mixed
blessing. Legal experts say some general counsels advise organizations
against doing such assessments if they don’t have the ability to quickly
fix any problems the auditors find, because customers and shareholders could have cause to sue if an organization knowingly disregards such warnings....
The
security review commissioned by the DNC (in 2015) was perhaps the most detailed
of a series of missed warnings....
The consultants briefed senior DNC leaders on the security problems
they found, the people familiar with the matter said. It’s unclear
whether Wasserman Schultz was present. Now, she is likely to face
criticism over not only the content of the e-mails -- including one in
which a party official proposes pushing stories in the news media
questioning Sanders’s Jewish faith -- but also the failure to take steps
to stop the theft in the first place.
“Shame on them. It looks
like they just did the review to check a box but didn’t do anything with
it,” said Ann Barron-DiCamillo, who was director of US-Cert, the
primary agency protecting U.S. government networks, until last February.
“If they had acted last fall, instead of those thousands of e-mails
exposed it might have been much less.”...
The
review found problems ranging from an out-of-date firewall to a lack of advanced malware detection technology on individual computers,
according to two of the people familiar with the matter.
The firm
recommended taking special precautions to protect any financial
information related to donors and internal communications including
e-mails, these people said.
The DNC paid $60,000 for the assessment, according to federal filings."...
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