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Report: Obama, McCain campaign computers were hacked by 'foreign
entity'

Newsweek says feds told Obama's team it had 'a problem way bigger than
you understand'

By Jaikumar Vijayan

November 5, 2008 (Computerworld)  Computer systems used by the
election campaigns of both President-elect Barack Obama and his
Republican rival Sen. John McCain were broken into earlier this year,
and a large number of files related to the evolving policy positions
of the two candidates were stolen, according to a story posted online
today by Newsweek magazine.

The attacks appear to have been perpetrated by an unidentified
"foreign entity" looking to steal information that might be useful in
future negotiations with the next U.S. president, Newsweek reported,
quoting several unnamed sources.

According to Newsweek, the attacks happened sometime around midyear
and were reported to the Obama and McCain campaigns by the U.S. Secret
Service, the FBI and even the White House. The story doesn't detail
how the feds learned about the intrusions but says they assured the
Obama camp that the break-ins didn't appear to be the work of his
political opponents. Obama's team was also informed that the McCain
campaign's computers had similarly been broken into, the story says.

A spokesman in McCain's press office said today that he didn't have
any information about the reported breaching of the Arizona senator's
campaign systems. Obama's press office didn't immediately respond to
inquiries about the Newsweek story.

But the former director of technology for the 2004 presidential
campaign of Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) voiced skepticism today
about some of the claims made in the story and said that it omits some
important information.

For example, it isn't clear from the story whether the servers running
the campaign Web sites were broken into or if the hacking targeted
other systems, such as e-mail servers, said Henry Poole, who now is a
partner at CivicActions LLC, a firm that offers Internet campaign
consulting services.

It's unlikely that either campaign would have stored sensitive data on
the same servers that were being used for public campaigning purposes,
Poole said. Typically, he added, all e-commerce activity on campaign
Web sites � including online donations � is heavily secured, while
other portions of the sites may not be as well protected. "It wasn't
clear to me at all what was compromised," he said.

In addition, while it's understandable that the FBI and Secret Service
would be involved in investigating such intrusions, it isn't at all
clear why the White House would be involved, Poole said.

According to the Newsweek story, a federal agent told Obama campaign
officials that they had an IT security problem "way bigger than what
you understand. You have been compromised, and a serious amount of
files have been loaded off your system."

Technical staffers working for Obama later speculated that the hackers
might have been from China or Russia, the story says. It adds that a
security firm retained by the campaign later plugged the security
holes.

The attacks reported by Newsweek aren't the first time that Obama's
campaign computers had been broken into during the run-up to the
election. In April, a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the social
networking section of Obama's Web site was exploited by a hacker who
redirected visitors to the Web site of rival Sen. Hillary Clinton
(D-N.Y.). That attack prompted the Obama campaign to take steps to
strengthen the security of its site.

McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, also became a
cybertarget earlier this year, when the son of a Tennessee state
legislator allegedly hacked into her Yahoo e-mail account to see if he
could find anything incriminating about the vice presidential
candidate. And early last month, Republican officials disclosed that a
laptop containing "strategic information" had been stolen from a
McCain campaign field office in Independence, Mo.

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