Both U.S Presidential Campaigns Hacked

Newsweek reports that the computer systems of M. Obama and M. McCain were both hacked by unknown attackers during their campaigns[1]. Very little information is available, but according to Newsweek, the FBI and the Secret Services claimed that several files from the Obama servers had been compromised by a “foreign entity” in midsummer. The same happened to the McCain campaign.

According to the FBI, documents were stole by foreign powers (probably Russia or China) in order to gather information for future negotiations.

But the former director of technology for the 2004 presidential campaign of Rep. Dennis Kucinich expressed skepticism about the claims. Henry Poole from CivicActions, a firm that offers Internet campaign consulting services, said “It’s unlikely that either campaign would have stored sensitive data on the same servers that were being used for public campaigning purposes[2]“.

It is unclear if anyone got compromised at all. If so, why would the FBI and Secret Services report such events? Hopefully there is more to come on this…

See also:

“Hackers and Spending Sprees”, Newsweek, November 5, 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/id/167581/page/1 (accessed on November 6, 2008)

“Both US political campaigns got hacked”, Egan Orion, The Inquirer, November 6, 2008, http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2008/11/06/both-political-campaigns-got (accessed on November 6, 2008)

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[1] “Hackers and Spending Sprees”, Newsweek, November 5, 2008, http://www.newsweek.com/id/167581/page/1 (accessed on November 6, 2008)

[2] “Report: Obama, McCain campaign computers were hacked by ‘foreign entity'”, Jaikumar Vijayan, ComputerWorld, http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Cybercrime+and+Hacking&articleId=9119221&taxonomyId=82&pageNumber=1 (accessed on November 6, 2008)