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Another Democratic Party committee has been hacked

Another Democratic Party committee has been hacked

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The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has suffered a security breach, and the FBI is investigating, writes Reuters. The incident, reported by four anonymous sources and later confirmed by the DCCC, comes shortly after WikiLeaks released a trove of damaging emails from the Democratic National Committee’s servers. The sources told Reuters that like the DNC hack, this new attack could have exposed information about Democratic donors, including credit card and social security information.

It’s not clear precisely how similar this attack is to the DNC hack, or how broad its scope was. Reuters reports that in June, "a bogus website was registered with a name closely resembling that of a main donation site connected to the DCCC." Then, "for some time," information about campaign donations was funneled to that site instead of a legitimate fundraising company. Reuters’ sources said that the goal may have been gathering information about donors, although we don’t know what was actually obtained.

We also don’t know who is behind it — and if they were also responsible for the DNC hack. That incident was claimed by a supposedly Romanian hacker known as Guccifer 2.0, but there’s evidence that it was carried out by a group or person in Russia. Reuters reports that the fake DCCC site’s IP address "resembled" one potentially used by Russian hackers, but the evidence seems loose and circumstantial.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has speculated that the Russian government orchestrated the DNC hack to sabotage her chances against Donald Trump in this fall’s election, by releasing documents that WikiLeaks published on the eve of the Democratic National Convention. It’s unclear whether this could lead to a similar data dump. While WikiLeaks promised that it had more information to release after the DNC emails, it has not made a public statement or responded to a request for comment about the DCCC.

Regardless, the data Reuters describes doesn’t seem like it would produce the same fallout within the Democratic party. Last week’s email release led the DNC to apologize to candidate Bernie Sanders for an apparent bias against him during the primaries, and chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigned in the aftermath of the leak. Currently, DCCC spokeswoman Meredith Kelly says that "the DCCC can confirm that we have been the target of a cybersecurity incident," but "the investigation is ongoing."