The Democrats’ Hacking Problems Just Got Worse

This time it’s the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.) speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia the day before it was revealed that the DCCC had been hacked. Bill Clark/Zuma

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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been hacked.

“The DCCC can confirm that we have been the target of a cybersecurity incident,” DCCC National Press Secretary Meredith Kelly said in a statement posted by Reuters‘ Dustin Volz. Kelly said the DCCC has engaged CrowdStrike, the same firm brought in to investigate the Democratic National Committee hack first revealed in June, to deal with the incident. “Based on the information we have to date, we’ve been advised by investigators that this is similar to other recent incidents, including the DNC breach,” said Kelly.

The DCCC is party’s fundraising and campaign arm for Democratic House incumbents and candidates. Reuters first reported Thursday night that the DCCC had been hacked in order to get information about donors, or perhaps to redirect donations intended for the DCCC to a phony website. Reuters‘ sources said there’s evidence to suggest that the attacks were associated with Russian-based computers. A Kremlin spokesperson told the news service that Russia wasn’t involved: “We don’t see the point any more in repeating yet again that this is silliness.”

The revelations about the DCCC come a week after Wikileaks posted nearly 20,000 hacked DNC documents, emails, and other files and revealed, among other things, that some DNC officials had discussed ways to harm Bernie Sanders’ campaign for president. Released the day after the Republican convention in Cleveland, the revelations disrupted the beginning of the Democratic convention and forced the resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. The DNC announced June 14 that it had been hacked over the course of a year and that its  security research firm believed Russian hackers were responsible. In the ensuing weeks, other cybersecurity researchers and anonymous US government officials have blamed Russian hackers working with or for the Russian government for the intrusion. Some of these officials have suggested that Russia is attempting to influence the 2016 presidential election.

James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, said Thursday that the US government doesn’t “know enough [yet] to…ascribe a motivation [for the hack] regardless of who it may have been.” He told an audience at the Aspen Security forum in Colorado that it was probably the work of one of “the usual suspects.” But he also said that he’s “taken aback a bit by…the hyperventilation” over the DNC hack.

“I’m shocked somebody did some hacking,” he told the crowd sarcastically. “That’s never happened before.”

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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