Whoops.
What the Democratic National Committee this week thought was an attempted hack of its valuable voter file turned out to be a security test organized by a state party, unbeknownst to the national organization.
The committee on Tuesday alerted the FBI to a fake online portal it thought had been set up as an elaborate attempt to trick DNC staff into giving up their log-in credentials — through a hacker technique known as “phishing” — as a way to gain access to the party’s VoteBuilder database.
On Thursday morning, DNC Chief Security Officer Bob Lord reversed course. “We, along with the partners who reported the [fake] site, now believe it was built by a third party as part of a simulated phishing test on VoteBuilder,” he said in a statement.