Democratic National Committee says hackers tried breaking into voter database

August 22, 2018 | 2:39pm | Updated August 22, 2018 | 2:51pm

Hackers unsuccessfully tried to break into the Democratic National Committee’s voter database two years after Russians hacked the party’s computers and released thousands of internal emails in the run-up to the 2016 elections.

The party contacted the FBI Tuesday after it found out about what was believed to be the beginning of a sophisticated effort to hack into the database, CNN reported.

Bob Lord, a former Yahoo executive who is now the party’s top security official, briefed Democrats on the attempt at a meeting of the Association of State Democratic Committees in Chicago on Wednesday.

“These threats are serious and that’s why it’s critical that we all work together, but we can’t do this alone. We need the [Trump] administration to take more aggressive steps to protect our voting systems. It is their responsibility to protect our democracy from these types of attacks,” Lord said in a statement to CNN.

The DNC was informed of the attempt Tuesday morning by a cloud service provider and a security research firm that a fake login page had been created in an attempt to harvest usernames and passwords that would allow entry to the party’s database, the network said, citing sources.

The source said the DNC was investigating who was behind the effort.

The bogus page was first discovered late Monday by Lookout, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity firm.

The company doesn’t work for the DNC but alerted the party to its findings, Mike Murray, the company’s vice president of security intelligence, told CNN.

“It was very convincing,” Murray said, adding that if someone saw the real login page and the phony login page side by side, it would be hard to tell them apart.

“It would have been a very effective attack,” he said.

CNN has reached out to the FBI for comment.

Also Tuesday, Microsoft said that an operation linked to Russian spies targeting the US Senate and conservative think tanks that advocated for tougher policies against Russia was thwarted the previous week.

President Trump for years has downplayed Russia’s role in the earlier hack attack, suggesting that he believed Vladimir Putin’s denials despite the US intelligence community’s unanimous conclusion that Russia was to blame.

Trump on Wednesday once again dismissed special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling and possible collusion with Trump’s campaign as a “Witch Hunt!” — despite guilty pleas a day earlier by his lawyer Michael Cohen and the conviction of his one-time campaign chairman Paul Manafort on fraud charges.

https://nypost.com/2018/08/22/dnc-says-hackers-tried-breaking-into-voter-database/