Federal officials warned the Democratic National Committee that its network had been breached months before the party attempted to resolve the problem, according to a new report.
The comments came from an unnamed person briefed on the incident speaking to CNN. However, the person said, the warning was too vague for the DNC to understand, which meant the party failed to act until additional indications of an intrusion surfaced. The party then retained cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which investigated and said it had ejected the intruders by mid-June.
Investigators said the breach began around the same time Russians hacked unclassified servers at the State Department and White House. Those intrusions were quickly detected by the NSA, which found signatures leading them to believe the hackers had extended their reach beyond the government.
Approximately 20,000 emails from the breach were posted on WikiLeaks on Friday. The messages revealed, among other issues, that DNC officials had colluded with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign during the party’s primary process, leading DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to announce her resignation over the weekend.
Officials told CNN the White House convened a security meeting even before the leak to discuss what intelligence agencies knew about the issue, and on Monday, the FBI announced it was beginning an investigation, which was to include meetings with Democratic and Republican leaders to discuss security measures.
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The attack has been traced to groups with ties to the Russian government, though U.S. officials have not formally attributed responsibility for the attack. The determination of whether that attribution will eventually be made is something that will ultimately fall on the White House working under the advice of law enforcement.
“I think the FBI does its investigation, and then we’ll deem whether it’s appropriate to make that attribution public,” Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo, a Republican who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told the Washington Examiner on Monday. “Those are judgment calls that have to be left in the hands of professional security experts involved in making sure Russians don’t have access to U.S. domestic emails.
“It may be the case that they prefer they not be attributed. Political actors should not be attributed when they so direct. There are other times law enforcement may deem it useful to identify who the actor was so that private organizations and public entities can prevent the same actor from attacking again,” he added. “Ultimately, responsibility for preventing attacks falls to the executive branch. It’s up to them to determine whether attribution is appropriate or not.”
