He was left to figure out, largely on his own, how to respond - and even whether the man who had called in to the D.N.C.
employee he works for a Chicago-based contracting firm called The MIS Department. Brown and fielded the call from the F.B.I. But when Russian hackers started in on the D.N.C., the committee did not have the most advanced systems in place to track suspicious traffic, internal D.N.C. had a standard email spam-filtering service, intended to block phishing attacks and malware created to resemble legitimate email. “There was never enough money to do everything we needed to do,” Mr. was a nonprofit group, dependent on donations, with a fraction of the security budget that a corporation its size would have. Brown and his bosses at the organization acknowledged: The D.N.C. was well protected against cyberintruders - and then there was the reality, Mr. There were aspirations to ensure that the D.N.C. But as he began to plan for this year’s election cycle, he was well aware that the D.N.C. “GOP Security Aide Among 5 Arrested in Bugging Affair,” reads the headline from the front page of The Washington Post on June 19, 1972, with the bylines of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.Īndrew Brown, 37, the technology director at the D.N.C., was born after that famous break-in. Only a framed newspaper story hanging on the wall hints at the importance of this aged piece of office furniture. Sitting in the basement of the Democratic National Committee headquarters, below a wall-size 2012 portrait of a smiling Barack Obama, is a 1960s-era filing cabinet missing the handle on the bottom drawer. “The stakes are too high for our country.” A Target for Break-Ins “This cannot become a partisan issue,” they said. By his own account, he did not look too hard even after Special Agent Hawkins called back repeatedly over the next several weeks - in part because he wasn’t certain the caller was a real F.B.I. computer system logs to look for hints of such a cyberintrusion. His first moves were to check Google for “the Dukes” and conduct a cursory search of the D.N.C. who fielded the call, was no expert in cyberattacks.
Yared Tamene, the tech-support contractor at the D.N.C. knew it well: The bureau had spent the last few years trying to kick the Dukes out of the unclassified email systems of the White House, the State Department and even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, one of the government’s best-protected networks. had been compromised by hackers federal investigators had named “the Dukes,” a cyberespionage team linked to the Russian government. At least one computer system belonging to the D.N.C. WASHINGTON - When Special Agent Adrian Hawkins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation called the Democratic National Committee in September 2015 to pass along some troubling news about its computer network, he was transferred, naturally, to the help desk.