The DNC hacked

The Democratic National Committee was hacked in 2015 and again this year. Hacked opposition research was posted online and made the headlines. The DNC’s security consultant — CrowdStrike — attributes the hacking to operatives of the Russian government.

Guccifer 2.0 (whoddat?) has posted a set of donor related documents that complicate the story. The DNC’s early attempts to minimize the extent of the hacking have not held up. They appear to be an exercise in wishful thinking or public relations.

Wired reports the story here and here with a good set of links; the Washington Post reports it here. Yesterday Time’s Haley Edwards emphasized the who in this particular whodunnit.

The story obviously bears on the mind-boggling story of the private server used by Hillary Clinton to conduct official business as Secretary of State. The hack of the DNC appears to have gone on for a year before it was discovered. The identity of the perpetrators is unclear. The penetration was wide and deep. According to the Post: “The intruders so thoroughly compromised the DNC’s system that they also were able to read all email and chat traffic.” Hmmmm.

At Forbes, Paul Gregory quotes CrowdStrike on the hack: “[I]t is extremely difficult for a civilian organization to protect itself from a skilled and determined state such as Russia.” That too seems to bear rather directly on the case of Clinton’s private server. Gregory draws out the relevance of the hack of the DNC to the Clinton case in a way that the other stories overlook.

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