Mod edit with new info:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/us/politics/democratic-hacking-voter-database-false-alarm.html
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/22/politics/democratic-national-committee-voter-database/index.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/us/politics/democratic-hacking-voter-database-false-alarm.html
WASHINGTON — The suspected hacking attempt of the Democratic National Committee's voter database this week was a false alarm and the unusual activity that raised concern was merely a test, party officials said on Thursday.
The blunder was caused by a lack of communication between the national committee and one of its state branches, the officials said. The Michigan Democratic Party had hired hackers to simulate an attack known as phishing, but did not inform the national committee.
The Michigan Democratic Party's test had attributes similar to an actual hacking, said Bob Lord, the national committee's chief security officer. When the Democratic National Committee was contacted by cybersecurity experts earlier this week about the activity, it notified the F.B.I. out of fears that it was another Russian attempt to penetrate the committee, as Moscow did during the 2016 presidential campaign.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/22/politics/democratic-national-committee-voter-database/index.html
The Democratic National Committee contacted the FBI on Tuesday after it detected what it believes was the beginning of a sophisticated attempt to hack into its voter database, a Democratic source tells CNN.
The DNC was alerted in the early hours of Tuesday morning by a cloud service provider and a security research firm that a fake login page had been created in an attempt to gather usernames and passwords that would allow access to the party's database, the source said.
The fraudulent page was designed to look like the access page Democratic Party officials and campaigns across the country use to log into a service called Votebuilder, which hosts the database, the source said, adding the DNC believed it was designed to trick people into handing over their login details.
The source said the DNC is investigating who may have been responsible for the attempted attack, but that it has no reason to believe its voter file was accessed or altered.
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