(Bloomberg) – Hackers tied to the Russian government gained access to servers at the Democratic National Committee, the party confirmed Tuesday.
The hackers secured the party's full database of opposition research on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the hack.
"The security of our system is critical to our operation and to the confidence of the campaigns and state parties we work with," said DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Florida representative. She said the party "treated this like the serious incident it is" and hired a cyber-security firm. That firm, CrowdStrike, identified as the culprit a pair of sophisticated hacking groups known as "Cozy Bear" and "Fancy Bear," which it said are closely tied to Russian intelligence services.
Political and economic espionage
Both groups "engage in extensive political and economic espionage for the benefit of the government of the Russian Federation and are believed to be closely linked to the Russian government's powerful and highly capable intelligence services," CrowdStrike's cofounder Dmitri Alperovitch said in a statement on its website.
Alperovitch identified Cozy Bear as the group that infiltrated unclassified networks of the White House, State Department and Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. Their "tradecraft is superb, operational security second to none and the extensive usage of 'living-off-the-land' techniques enables them to easily bypass many security solutions they encounter," the statement said.
The Post said the intruders were able to read email and chat traffic, in addition to the so-called "oppo" files on Trump. Hackers have also targeted the Trump and Clinton presidential campaigns but no details were available on the intrusions, according to the Post."Our team moved as quickly as possible to kick out the intruders and secure our network," Wasserman Schultz said.
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