Russian government hackers gained access to the Democratic National Committee’s computer network and stole information on presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz called the incident “serious” and says her team acted quickly to secure the network, reaching out to the cyber firm CrowdStrike to help with the hack, as first reported by the Washington Post.
The hackers were able to read all of the DNC’s emails and chat traffic, having had access for about a year in some cases, according to the Post. The DNC claims that no financial, donor or personal information appears to have been accessed. The Post speculates that it’s traditional espionage, as opposed to criminal hackers, because donor information was not stolen.
While Hillary Clinton has been in politics for decades, adversaries are presumably playing catch up while trying to gather data on Trump.
“It’s the job of every foreign intelligence service to collect intelligence against their adversaries, CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry told the Post. “We’re perceived as an adversary of Russia.”
Meanwhile, Russian president Vladimir Putin and Trump have publicly spoken favorably about each other.