Cyber Firm Defends DNC Hacking Alert That Turned Out to be a False Alarm
The public should applaud the Democratic National Committee’s efforts to thwart an apparent attempt to hack its voter database—even though that hack turned out to be a false alarm, a researcher who helped uncover the operation told Nextgov Thursday.
The DNC alerted the FBI about the attempted breach on Tuesday after being tipped off by the cybersecurity firm Lookout and the cloud company DigitalOcean, according to media reports.
The companies had spotted a phony log-in page designed to con DNC staff into giving up their usernames, passwords and other credentials. By Thursday, however, the DNC had learned the phony log-in page was actually friendly fire: a test set up by a state Democratic party to gauge employees’ ability to withstand phishing attempts.
