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The Democratic National Committee headquarters iin Washington, D.C. (Photo: Alex Brandon/AP)
Just
weeks after she started preparing opposition research files on Donald
Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort last spring, Democratic National
Committee consultant Alexandra Chalupa got an alarming message when she
logged into her personal Yahoo email account.
“Important
action required,” read a pop-up box from a Yahoo security team that is
informally known as “the Paranoids.” “We strongly suspect that your
account has been the target of state-sponsored actors.”
Chalupa
— who had been drafting memos and writing emails about Manafort’s
connection to pro-Russian political leaders in Ukraine — quickly alerted
top DNC officials. “Since I started digging into Manafort, these
messages have been a daily occurrence on my Yahoo account despite
changing my password often,” she wrote in a May 3 email to Luis Miranda, the DNC’s communications director, which included an attached screengrab of the image of the Yahoo security warning.
“I
was freaked out,” Chalupa, who serves as director of “ethnic
engagement” for the DNC, told Yahoo News in an interview, noting that
she had been in close touch with sources in Kiev, Ukraine, including a
number of investigative journalists, who had been providing her with
information about Manafort’s political and business dealings in that country and Russia.
“This is really scary,” she said.
Chalupa’s
message is among nearly 20,000 hacked internal DNC emails that were
posted over the weekend by WikiLeaks as the Democratic Party gathered
for its national convention in Philadelphia. Those emails have already
provoked a convulsion in Democratic Party ranks, leading to the
resignation of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the wake of posted
messages in which she and other top DNC officials privately derided
Bernie Sanders and plotted to undercut his insurgent campaign against
Hillary Clinton.
But
Chalupa’s message, which had not been previously reported, stands out:
It is the first indication that the reach of the hackers who penetrated
the DNC has extended beyond the official email accounts of committee
officials to include their private email and potentially the content on
their smartphones. After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which
mentions that she had invited this reporter to a meeting with Ukrainian
journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns within the
DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. “That’s when we knew it was
the Russians,” said a Democratic Party source who has knowledge of the
internal probe into the hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the
source said, “we told her to stop her research.”
A
Yahoo spokesman said the pop-up warning to Chalupa “appears to be one
of our notifications” and said it was consistent with a new policy
announced by Yahoo on its Tumblr page last December to notify customers
when it has strong evidence of “state sponsored” cyberattacks. “Rest
assured we only send these notifications of suspected attacks by
state-sponsored actors when we have a high degree of confidence,” wrote
Bob Lord, the company’s Chief Information Security Office
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