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....
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 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.”...
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