The United States has evidence of hackers spying on presidential candidates. These hackers might be working for foreign governments, said Intelligence Chief on Wednesday. According to him, the Government officials are making efforts to tighten the security of the election campaigns.
This scenario mimics what happened in the last two election campaigns. A lot of data was hacked in 2008, according to US intelligence reports, making President Obama and Mitt Romney main targets of Chinese cyber-attacks four years after the presidential election. Similarly, according to cyber experts, the campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are not secure enough to eradicate the risks involved.
According to James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, ?We’ve already had some indications” of hacking. James Clapper was present at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. He added that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security were assisting in educating the campaigns.
While talking about the attacked, Clapper said, ?We?ll probably have more.?
Clapper?s office released a report earlier this month revealing the role of foreign intelligence services in tracking the 2008 presidential election cycle on a massive level. The document was presented as a slide show to signify the Obama administration officials and warn them that they could become potential targets.
The report said that eight years ago a lot of foreign intelligence services met with campaign contacts and staff, used human source networks for policy insights, exploited technology to get otherwise sensitive data, engaged in perception management to influence policy. This exceeded traditional lobbying and public diplomacy.?
According to Jonathan Lampe who is with the InfoSec Institute, the security against hackers hasn?t improved a bit. InfoSec Institute is based in Chicago and is a private information security company.
Jonathan had evaluated the security of 16 websites of candidates back in October last year and presented a few reports. Utilizing the skills of a hacker, Lampe was able to hack into the usernames and technologies used on most websites. He even discovered which directories were easily accessible via the internet and which ones were safe.
“Everybody was sitting with their pants down and by the time we looked at the sites in March, everybody had made fixes,” he said.
He is of the view that foreign intelligence services are still snooping. He added, ?The sites were open enough back in October that anyone who grabbed the information then and wanted to use it, could still use it now.”
It should be noted here that the notorious international group of hackers calling themselves Anonymous has already declared cyber war on Donald Trump.
?Dear Donald Trump, we have been watching you for a long time and what we see is deeply disturbing,? said a masked figure that appeared on YouTube weeks ago.
Donald Trump, the New York billionaire, is probably the most prone to cyber-attacks, as noted by John Dickson of the Denim Group. Dickson is a San Antonio developer of secure software. He added, ?If it’s the Bernie Sanders campaign, it’s probably one website. If it’s Donald Trump, it’s his entire empire.?