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By George Norman - Software News Editor

Added on 06 Nov 2008(720 Views)

Now that the elections are over, all the sordid little details are starting to surface. One such detail that the public was not aware of is the fact that the campaign computers of both Barack Obama and John McCain were hacked into. Sure, we did know that someone managed to breach President Obama’s web page and redirect traffic to the Hillary Clinton site, but we had no clue someone actually managed to hack campaign computers and steal data stored on them.

The whole thing is shrouded in mystery so far. All we know for sure is that an unknown attacker of presumed foreign origin managed to break into Obama and McCain campaign computers and steal a considerably large amount of files that were stored on those machines. At the time the security breach occurred, the campaign workers believed they had a virus on their hands and were blissfully unaware of the hacker attack. Only after the FBI and the Secret Service stepped in was the attack detected.


The FBI is still investigating the issue, but it is believed that the same person(s) initiated both attacks. The similarities between the two hackings point to this conclusion. We will know for sure only when the investigation ends. Another thing that the investigators pointed out is the fact that the attack was most likely conducted by a foreign entity, ruling out a political rival.

The attacker’s presumed goal was to gather as much information as possible on the “policy positions” of both candidates and use that information in future negotiations with the US.

As mentioned before, this is not the first time that an attack on the Democratic Party is successful. Back in April, IT security company NetCraft announced that a hacker going by the name of Mox managed to break into the web page of the at the time presidential candidate Barack Obama and redirected all incoming traffic. Thanks to a cross-site scripting vulnerability, Mox was able to redirect all visitors to Hillary Clinton’s web page.





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Tags: Barack Obama, Hacking

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