A new article at the Daily Beast, by Andrew Desiderio and Kevin Poulsen, reveals that Russian hackers are trying to repeat the Podesta playbook against Claire McCaskill’s 2018 Senate campaign. Specifically, they tried to spear-phish her staff around September 2017:
The attempt against McCaskill’s office was a variant of the password-stealing technique used by Russia’s so-called “Fancy Bear” hackers against Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, in 2016.
The hackers sent forged notification emails to Senate targets claiming the target’s Microsoft Exchange password had expired, and instructing them to change it. If the target clicked on the link, he or she was taken to a convincing replica of the U.S. Senate’s Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) login page, a single sign-on point for e-mail and other services.
McCaskill is one of the most vulnerable Democratic senators up for re-election in this fall’s midterms. She has also been sharply critical of the Russian government over the years. Both of these make her a natural target for Russia’s hackers.
The good news, such as it is, is that there’s no evidence this attack worked:
There’s no evidence to suggest that this particular attack was successful. Asked about the hack attempt by Russia’s GRU intelligence agency, McCaskill told The Daily Beast on Thursday that she wasn’t yet prepared to discuss it.
“I’m not going to speak of it right now,” she said. “I think we’ll have something on it next week. I’m not going to speak about it right now. I can’t confirm or do anything about it right now.”
I’m very curious to hear what McCaskill has to say about this — and then how our elected officials respond. Either way, this is a five-alarm fire, right now.