(RNN) – Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri believes there’s been an attempt by Russian hackers to infiltrate her 2018 campaign, she said following a media report on .
McCaskill, a two-term Democrat running for re-election, acknowledged the hacking attempt to The Daily Beast after the outlet discovered it through a “forensic analysis.”
She originally said she was “not going to speak of it right now” before later issuing a statement said “this attack was not successful.”
“It is outrageous that they think they can get away with this,” McCaskill’s statement said. “I will not be intimidated. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Putin is a thug and a bully.”
The Daily Beast reported the hack occurred about a year ago.
The outlet described the attempted hack as a phishing attack, in which emails made to appear they are from reputable senders, like Microsoft or Google, are sent with links to forgery sites where people are told they need to enter their password, for some kind of update or security reason.
The Daily Beast reported this particular phishing attack was aimed at Senate email addresses, and led to a “convincing replica of the U.S. Senate’s Active Directory Federation Services login page.”
The forgery sites apparently used a Microsoft domain. According to Microsoft executive Tom Burt, who addressed phishing attacks at a conference last week, the company knows of two more Senate candidates who were targeted.
The Daily Beast was able to identify McCaskill as a target by looking at a saved version of the phishing site, which showed an email address from mccaskill.senate.gov.
McCaskill easily won re-election in 2012 with more than 54 percent of the vote against Republican Todd Akin who earned wide condemnation for saying “legitimate rape” rarely results in pregnancy. But President Donald Trump won the state in a landslide in 2016, with more than 56 percent of the vote.
She is running in 2018 against an as-yet-undetermined Republican, with state attorney general Josh Hawley the presumed favorite.
She was sharply critical of Trump after his summit with Putin in Helsinki, Finland.
She said his conciliatory stance with Russia “will only embolden the enemies of our country and erode the support of our allies.”
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