How else could a Democrat possibly lose an election? no I'm not a
Republican.

Yes, it's Russia!
“Russia continues to engage in cyber warfare against our democracy."

Let's find out who it is!
“I hope we can find out where this is coming from and go after them with
the force of law,”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-hackers-new-target-a-vulnerable-democratic-senator?via=twitter_page

Russian Hackers’ New Target: a Vulnerable Democratic Senator
Sen. Claire McCaskill is a top target for Republicans looking to grow
their slim Senate majority in 2018. Turns out, Russia’s “Fancy Bear”
hackers are going after her staff, too.

Kevin Poulsen,
Andrew Desiderio
07.26.18 5:22 PM ET
EXCLUSIVE
The Russian intelligence agency behind the 2016 election cyberattacks
targeted Sen. Claire McCaskill as she began her 2018 re-election campaign
in earnest, a Daily Beast forensic analysis reveals. That makes the
Missouri Democrat the first identified target of the Kremlin’s 2018
election interference.

McCaskill, who has been highly critical of Russia over the years, is
widely considered to be among the most vulnerable Senate Democrats facing
re-election this year as Republicans hope to hold their slim majority in
the Senate. In 2016, President Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by
almost 20 points in the senator’s home state of Missouri.

There’s no evidence to suggest that this attempt to lure McCaskill
staffers was successful. The precise purpose of the approach was also
unclear. Asked about the hack attempt by Russia’s GRU intelligence
agency, McCaskill told The Daily Beast on Thursday that she wasn’t yet
prepared to discuss it.

“I’m not going to speak of it right now,” she said. “I think
we’ll have something on it next week. I’m not going to speak about it
right now. I can’t confirm or do anything about it right now.”

The senator later released a statement asserting that the cyberattack was
unsuccessful.

“Russia continues to engage in cyber warfare against our democracy. I
will continue to speak out and press to hold them accountable,”
McCaskill said. “While this attack was not successful, it is outrageous
that they think they can get away with this. I will not be intimidated.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Putin is a thug and a
bully.”

In August 2017, around the time of the hack attempt, Trump traveled to
Missouri and chided McCaskill, telling the crowd to “vote her out of
office.” Just this last week, however, Trump said, on Twitter, that he
feared Russians would intervene in the 2018 midterm elections on behalf of
Democrats.

“In August 2017, around the time of the hack attempt, Trump traveled to
Missouri and chided McCaskill, telling the crowd to ‘vote her out of
office.’”
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The revelations of the attempted hack of McCaskill staffers comes just
weeks after Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian
intelligence officers, accusing them of orchestrating cyberattacks that
targeted the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee, and Clinton’s campaign in 2016.

On Friday, Trump is scheduled to chair a meeting of the National Security
Council on election vulnerabilities facing the midterm elections—amid
persistent criticism, particularly after his Helsinki meeting with Russian
President Vladimir Putin, that he isn’t taking Russian interference
seriously.

The attempt against McCaskill’s office was a variant of the
password-stealing technique used by Russia’s so-called “Fancy Bear”
hackers against Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, in 2016.

The hackers sent forged notification emails to Senate targets claiming the
target’s Microsoft Exchange password had expired, and instructing them
to change it. If the target clicked on the link, he or she was taken to a
convincing replica of the U.S. Senate’s Active Directory Federation
Services (ADFS) login page, a single sign-on point for e-mail and other
services.

As with the Podesta phishing, each Senate phishing email had a different
link coded with the recipient's email address. That allowed the fake
password-change webpage to display the user’s email address when they
arrived, making the site appear more convincing.

In October, Microsoft wrested control of one of the spoofed website
addresses—adfs.senate.qov.info. Seizing the Russians’ malicious domain
names has been easy for Microsoft since August 2017, when a federal judge
in Virginia issued a permanent injunction against the GRU hackers, after
Microsoft successfully sued them as unnamed “John Doe” defendants. The
court established a process that lets Microsoft take over any web
addresses the hackers use that includes a Microsoft trademark.

Microsoft redirected the traffic from the fake Senate site to its own
sinkhole server, putting it in a prime position to view targets trying to
click through to change their passwords.

The Daily Beast identified McCaskill as a target while investigating
statements made by Microsoft VP Tom Burt last week in an appearance at the
Aspen Security Forum. Burton discussed the Virginia injunction, and told
the audience that it allowed Microsoft to thwart a phishing campaign
against three midterm election candidates, whom he declined to name.

“We did discover that a fake Microsoft domain had been established as
the landing page for phishing attacks, and we saw metadata that suggested
those phishing attacks were being directed at three candidates who are all
standing for elections in the midterm elections,” said Burt,
Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust.
“We took down that domain and working with the government actually were
able to avoid anybody being infected by that particular attack.”

The most recent domain seizures recorded in the Virginia case took place
between August and December of last year, when Microsoft grabbed seven
malicious web addresses, including the “qov.info” address. A report
from the security company Trend Micro released in January listed that
address and the role it played in a Senate phishing campaign against
unnamed targets.

A snapshot of a deep link on the phishing site taken September 26th by a
website security scanner showed the fake password-change page with the
Senate email address of a McCaskill policy aide on display.

“McCaskill has spoken out forcefully against Moscow, likening Russian
election-meddling to ‘a form of warfare’ and calling Putin a ‘thug
and a bully.’”
There is a notable divide between Congress and the Trump administration
over the vulnerability of the 2018 election to Russian election
interference.

In March, the Senate Intelligence Committee warned state election
officials to make cybersecurity a “high priority” for their election
systems, particularly over voter databases, and urged the states to
bolster their coordination with the Department of Homeland Security. But
the secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, appeared earlier
this month to downplay the threat. While “adversaries and nonstate
actors” consider U.S. elections a persistent target, Nielsen said there
are “no indications that Russia is targeting the 2018 U.S. midterms at a
scale or scope to match their activities in 2016.”

By contrast, Dan Coats, the embattled director of national intelligence,
testified in February that Russia considered its 2016 election hacking a
success. Putin “views the 2018 U.S. midterm elections as a potential
target for Russian influence operations,” Coats told the Senate
intelligence panel. Last week, after being rebuked by Trump beside Putin
in Helsinki, Coats reiterated his concern about Russia’s “ongoing,
pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy.”

Earlier this year, Congress appropriated $380 million, as part of a
broader spending package, to individual states for election security. The
Senate is currently weighing whether to authorize an additional $250
million in similar grants.

A spokesperson for the Senate Intelligence Committee declined to comment,
as did a spokesperson for Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the
panel.

McCaskill is one of 10 Senate Democrats facing re-election this year in
states that Trump won in 2016. Her likely Republican challenger is Josh
Hawley, who currently serves as the state’s attorney general. Outside
groups and campaign committees have spent more than $15.5 million against
McCaskill so far.

McCaskill has spoken out forcefully against Moscow, likening Russian
election-meddling to “a form of warfare” and calling Putin a “thug
and a bully.” She was also caught up in the Podesta hack, which was
revealed when WikiLeaks released the Clinton campaign chairman’s private
email communications. The document dump showed that McCaskill called
Podesta to inform him that she had “info” about an individual working
in the State Department’s inspector general’s office, which at the
time was investigating Clinton’s private email server. The “info”
was that a top aide at the inspector general’s office once worked for a
Republican senator, Chuck Grassley of Iowa.