Yahoo News reported this morning that Russian-backed hackers continued their attacks on the Clinton campaign and the Democratic party during the final days of the election.
Their final attempts to compromise the campaign, which apparently failed, involving phishing scams that prompted security alerts from the likes of Google.
[At] least one top Clinton campaign staffer, communications director Jennifer Palmieri, told Yahoo News Sunday that she received an alert from Google in mid-October informing her that her personal Gmail account had been targeted by a “foreign state” actor and that her password needed to be changed.
“They were targeting us throughout the election,” said another former senior Clinton campaign staffer, who asked not to be identified. “They never stopped trying to get back in.”
Palmieri is not alone in receiving an alert from Google warning her that a government-backed attacker had targeted them. Other Deemocratic campaign operatives and, more recently, even liberal journalists have received similar warnings that have been widely shared on social media.
I don't expect this will end any time soon, and actors other than Russia may engage in this kind of activity. There don't appear to be any consequences for doing so, at least not yet. Moreover, a significant portion of our own news media is desperate enough for material they will happily obsesses over the mundane emails of private citizens that are handed to them by foreign actors.
I believe the of lionization Edward Snowden and the gross misreporting of the documents he leaked to the public catalyzed this. No one in the media paid a price for getting the stories completely factually wrong. Many were actually rewarded for it, just as they were rewarded for engaging in a clickbait bonanza with misleading stories about the Clinton Foundation.
I'm sure someone more qualified than me is writing a book about that subject right now.