FBI probes possible computer breach (Pa Dem cong. candidate)

[yellowcanine]

http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/113-10012004-375177.html

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into a report from Democratic congressional candidate Ginny Schrader's campaign that someone might have attempted to hack into one of its computers.
snip
The McAfee security system that reported the breach Tuesday afternoon listed Virginia-based political consulting firm Campaign Solutions and one of the company's staffers - the employee's name was misspelled in the report - as the source of the alleged hacking attempt.
snip
Campaign Solutions describes itself as a "Republican voter contact and communications firm" on its Web site, and lists several big-time GOP organizations or candidates as clients, including the Bush-Cheney campaign, the Republican National Committee and the Pennsylvania House Republican Committee.

Ok googlers - was this the same outfit that was involved in some previous Republican shennanigans? The name sounds vaguely familiar.

[Cerridwen]

1. I found this...anything near what you were thinking?

http://mediaprima.com/nv1962/archive/2004/10/2

[yellowcanine]

4. We have a winner! - Senate memogate. Thanks

Two Republican Senate staffers accessed and leaked information from thousands of Democratic files over an 18-month period, an investigation by the U.S. Senate Sergeant at Arms has concluded.

...The probe began after memos authored by Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee were leaked to several newspapers and published in early November 2003. The documents, which indicated that Democrats consulted with free-speech advocates and other lobbying groups on judicial strategy, were said by conservatives to show that the Democratic Party followed the agenda of special interests.

"The memos repeatedly make clear that a small collection of extreme-left groups--abortion groups, race organizations and leftist groups specifically focused on judges--are driving the Democrats' agenda and vision," stated a November editorial by the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary, a pro-Republican lobbying group. The group--whose Web site is hosted by Campaign Solutions, a self-described "Republican voter contact and communications firm" -- posted all 18 memos to the Web in November 2003.

[yellowcanine]

5. Also - hacking of Hillary Clinton's website in 1999?

CNN July 22, 1999: Hillary gets hacked

Hockaday Donatelli Campaign Solutions, the firm that maintains the Hillaryno.com site, denied any involvement in hacking the rival site and said it was unaware of the maneuver until contacted by a reporter. "This is not a good thing," said Becky Donatelli, cochair of the Virginia-based consulting firm that has built Web sites for a large number of Republican candidates.

Ok folks - three connections of this firm to electronic theft or hacking of Democratic websites. Is this enough smoke to suspect a rather large fire?

[peacetalksforall]

2. Read about this now - as it will disappear into the depths of Ashcroft's

garage and someone in the Justice Dept will, if asked, tell us in about two years that the investigation was closed without any findings of wrongdoing.

Like the put options.

[punpirate]

3. I don't yet see connections to...

... anything major, but I'll keep looking.

One of the things I did find was about the husband of one of the owners starting a 527 with the express purpose of filing a complaint with the FEC about Democratic 527s. Scroll down for info:

http://betterangels.blogspot.com/

What I do find when doing a search for "campaign solutions" and "swift" is that it looks as if there are number of blogs, etc., commenting on the SBVfL that have been designed by Campaign Solutions.

Cheers.

[deadmessengers]

6. I'm not prone to defend Repugnicans, but...

I think we can loosen the band on our tinfoil hats here. I'm in the information security business, and I earn a reasonably good living making hackers miserable. I'm also familiar with the McAfee "security software" (it's called IDS, or an intrusion detection system) referred to in the article. Host-based IDS software is basically a burglar alarm on a computer - if someone tries to break in using one of a couple of thousand known methods of doing so, it'll flash an icon on your desktop, throw a popup on your screen, or send an email to an administrator. I can also tell you that the software in use here is a great big piece of shit, and is VERY prone to false positives - meaning that it alerts all the time when no true security threat exists.

While I certainly wouldn't put it past any Repugnican organization to resort to something like this (Watergate, anyone?), I also think that it's a lot more likely that the piece of crap IDS software was barking at nothing. The first rule of information security is to never attribute to malice what can be better explained by stupidity, and in this case, it might have been the fundamental stupidity of the IDS software.

On the other hand, I could be wrong. The article doesn't go into enough detail for me to make a more informed assessment. One thing I would like to know is: what was the computer's role? Is it a web server? An email server? Someone's desktop PC? If it were the latter, that would raise a BIG red flag in my mind. I'd also like to know what the nature of the alert was - IDS software usually gives you more detail than "someone tried to hack you" - normally, IDS software will log the data that led it to throw the alert in the first place, and provide other information that could be useful to a systems administrator or information security person.

[yellowcanine]

7. Can't answer your questions but McAfee did identify Computer Solutions

as the source of the "hack attempt" according to the original article. So that is a little more than "Someone tried to hack you." Would there be a way for someone else to make it appear that CS tried to get in - in other words, a dirty trick on both CS and the target?

[deadmessengers]

9. possible, but difficult.

To do that would indicate a high degree of skill on the part of the attacker.

[napi21]

8. You're disregarding the link with the prior offenses.

I'd buy your story...ONCE! If the same people are involved in multi offenses...there's a problem!

[deadmessengers]

10. Yep

At the time I started writing my (rather long) message, the other messages regarding their prior connections to politically-motivated cracking had yet to hit the thread. Now that I've seen the information that everyone else has posted, I can tell you this: if I were doing the investigation, and I've done more than a few, I would have Computer Solutions at the absolute top of my list of suspects, but not to the exclusion of all other possibilities - there's still the (rather remote) possibility that this could have been a skilled hacker setting both of them up and making them both chase their tails in the process.

On the other hand, the FBI has some very, very good computer crime investigators - some of the best in the business. They need advice from me like we need another four years of *.

[FDRrocks]

11. How many times are we gonna hear about Republicans

tampering with voting, voting registration, ballots etc.... before the FBI starts cracking down some fucking doors. This is annoying as hell, and a direct affront to our democracy.