Washington: The FBI and Justice Department are investigating a computer hack of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in addition to its examination of intrusions of other Democratic Party organizations, the CNN said on Saturday.
A hack on Democratic National Committee servers resulted in last week’s embarrassing leak of emails that revealed how party leaders sought to undermine Clinton’s Democratic White House rival Bernie Sanders.
Clinton’s campaign said on Saturday the hack on the DNC had accessed an analytics data program that it used. The program was maintained by the DNC, it said. “Our campaign computer system has been under review by outside cyber security experts,” campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement.
“To date, they have found no evidence that our internal systems have been compromised.” Meanwhile, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) said it was the target of a “cyber security incident.”
“The investigation is ongoing. Based on the information we have to date, we’ve been advised by investigators that this is similar to other recent incidents, including the DNC breach,” national press secretary Meredith Kelly said in a statement.
The Justice Department’s national security division, which was already investigating the DNC intrusion, is handling the investigation because of the believed similarities, one of the officials told CNN. There is strong evidence indicating the cyber intrusion of the DNC was the work of hackers working on behalf of Russian intelligence, US officials said this week.
A Clinton aide said the hackers had access to the analytics program’s server for approximately five days. The analytics data program is among many systems accessed to conduct voter analysis. It does not include social security numbers or credit card numbers.
‘More to come’
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange indicated more Clinton campaign leaks were forthcoming. “We have more material related to the Hillary Clinton campaign,” he told CNN on Saturday. “Those are extremely interesting. We will see what will come of them in due course.”
The whistleblower refused to say how WikiLeaks obtained the leaked emails, but pointed to reports that the DNC had previously been told its systems were vulnerable and had been compromised by hackers.
“The DNC and the RNC have been Swiss cheese in terms of their security,” he said. Assange defended the leak, saying it was “true information.”
