The campaign body for House Republicans was hacked ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, putting at risk sensitive information exchanged by top party officials via thousands of emails.
The email accounts of four senior National Republican Congressional Committee aides were compromised for months before the breaches were detected in April by MSSP, a security services contractor that monitors its network, Politico reported Tuesday.
“The NRCC can confirm that it was the victim of a cyber intrusion by an unknown entity,” Ian Prior, a vice president at Mercury, the public affairs firm retained by the NRCC to manage the hack, told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “The cybersecurity of the Committee’s data is paramount, and upon learning of the intrusion, the NRCC immediately launched an internal investigation and notified the FBI, which is now investigating the matter.”
Party officials did not tell Politico when the hack started, but they said donor information remained protected and no extortion attempts were made. They added that none of the details discussed in the compromised emails has so far been made public. The outlet reported that these officials privately indicated they believed a foreign intruder was behind the attack.
The party’s leadership team in the House and its rank-and-file members were not informed of the breach because officials feared it would limit their inquiry into the matter, according to Politico. The new NRCC chair Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., was advised Monday.
Following the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails, online security has been heightened at the NRCC. Proactive measures included the hiring of a full-time cybersecurity employee and Crowdstrike, an external cybersecurity firm.
The report comes after NRCC leaders backed out of a deal with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to refrain from using hacked or stolen material on the campaign trail, the New York Times reported in September. Similar efforts failed amid the 2016 election season.
