The Democratic National Committee discovers that someone without authorization is accessing their servers and has administration privileges. They contact CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm, to investigate.

CrowdStrike is able to trace the infiltrator back to Russia the next day.

No one knew just how bad the breach was — but it was clear that a lot more than a single filing cabinet worth of materials might have been taken. A secret committee was immediately created, including… Michael Sussmann, a former cyber crimes prosecutor at the Department of Justice who now works at Perkins Coie, the Washington law firm that handles D.N.C. political matters.

“Three most important questions,” Mr. Sussmann wrote to his clients the night the break-in was confirmed. “1) What data was accessed? 2) How was it done? 3) How do we stop it?”

Mr. Sussmann instructed his clients not to use D.N.C. email because they had just one opportunity to lock the hackers out — an effort that could be foiled if the hackers knew that the D.N.C. was on to them.

“You only get one chance to raise the drawbridge,” Mr. Sussmann said. “If the adversaries know you are aware of their presence, they will take steps to burrow in, or erase the logs that show they were present.”

Sources

https://themoscowproject.org/collusion/wikileaks-begins-publishing-dnc-emails/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/13/us/politics/russia-hack-election-dnc.html

Photo: Gage Skidmore