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Microsoft Reveals First Known Midterm Campaign Hacking Attempts (politico.com)

Posted by msmash on from the where-we-are dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft detected and helped block hacking attempts against three congressional candidates this year, a company executive said Thursday, marking the first known example of cyber interference in the midterm elections. "Earlier this year, we did discover that a fake Microsoft domain had been established as the landing page for phishing attacks," said Tom Burt, Microsoft's vice president for security and trust, at the Aspen Security Forum. "And we saw metadata that suggested those phishing attacks were being directed at three candidates who are all standing for election in the midterm elections."

Burt declined to name the targets but said they were "people who, because of their positions, might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint as well as an election disruption standpoint." Microsoft took down the fake domain and worked with the federal government to block the phishing messages.

7 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. But... by TFlan91 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But Trump said they weren't hacking us..............

    1. Re:But... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      He said they didn't hack the elections. Election day is different than campaigns. But anyway I get phishing mails spam all day long. I would hardly categorize that as hacking.

    2. Re: But... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Not going into a war because of it? USA trying to whine about Russia engaging in subversion like any rational competing government does, and much like USA does whenever there's Russian elections, is hilarious considering USA's own fucked up meddling in world governments, one of which lead to the emergence of a fundamentalist Iran that would never happen had USA never been involved in fucking up the Iranian people during and after Mosaddegh. Another fine historical meddling is USA putting Saddam into office and supplying him with weapons during the Iraq-Iran war (including chemical which would later be re-branded as WMDs for convenience), then deposing Saddam and fucking up Iraq, which then lead to ISIS/ISIL being born from American destabilizing a country to make it worse than it was during its Dictatorship that at least provided a stable economy and some form of order.

  2. Re: The hacking isn't nearly as troubling... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    And the same way libertarians will give to charity just as soon as social security is dismantled. Every party is packed with hypocrites and liars, many of them clearly misanthropic. Nothing I can do about that, so I'll just smoke my weed.

  3. Re:The hacking isn't nearly as troubling... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This is the reason why the #WalkAway movement is going strong and the whole "blue wave" thing is a myth. The Democrats have successfully turned their party toxic. They've made it quite clear that if you believe in the American Dream, that if you believe in hard work, that if you believe that everyone is truly equal: you have no place in their party. If you cannot find some "minority identity" to be instead of just being an American, you are not welcome. It's unclear if there even will be a Democratic Party by 2020 at the rate they're alienating voters.

  4. Re:The hacking isn't nearly as troubling... by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Friend, I have some Bad News for you, an epiphany I had some time ago: The America we all grew up thinking we were living in? IT NEVER EXISTED IN THE FIRST PLACE. Maybe it did for the first few months or years in the 18th century, but after that it started getting subverted by the greedy and the cruel, as you put it. Long before the time we were born, it was already gone.

    Let me tell you what is at least as big a threat, if not more so, than the foreign agents who are meddling in our electoral process: malicious natural U.S. citizens who are only really interested in 'pissing off liberals', and they don't care if they destroy the United States in the process, so long as they get their pound of flesh. CBS News conducted a poll that shows that even in the wake of Trump virtually selling out the U.S. Government to Vladimir Putin -- a shameful debacle that both sides of the Congressional aisle universally condemned -- Republicans are still supporting Trump. Even Congressional Republicans won't criticize him for long, because they're more interested in retaining their majority in Congress than they're interested in what's good for the entire country, so they let this train wreck of an Administration continue, even as Trump makes nice with one of the biggest villians on the planet today, an unmistakable enemy of the United States. That's why everything is so bad, that's why it all so completely fucked up, and until the GOP no longer has a majority in at least the House or the Senate it'll all just get worse and worse as time goes by. By 2020 there may not be much of a country left.

  5. Re:The hacking isn't nearly as troubling... by jedidiah · · Score: 3, Insightful

    > Talk radio conservatives, internet conservatives - every place with a passion for conservatism is pushing right in line with Trump.

    So you've never actually paid any attention to any of that stuff then.

    Conservatives are not nearly the mindless hive mind that liberals are. Talking heads even from the same outlet can have different points of view. Conservatives have a bigger tent (than liberals) these days.

    Considering what nonsense "liberals" have been latching onto lately, it's not really that hard to be considered a heretic by them.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.