Hacking attempts at anything election related has been on the rise lately as the race to the November 8 election starts to heat up. During the final stretch of the election run now, many more leaks and hacks to the campaigns are being revealed and now another one affecting the Republican party has been unearthed.
One website which has been used during the election to fund the campaigns of some Republican Senators who are up for re election this year. The website is said to have been infected by a malware for close to six months which took donor’s information such as their personal details including full name, address and the credit card data.
The storefront for the Republican election campaign was not the only one affected as 5,900 more e-commerce websites were also part of the affected group. Security researcher, William De Groot, was the one to have discovered the malicious skimming software on the websites. According to De Groot, the website was affected by the malware from March 16 2016 to October 5 of the same year and in between this period donor information was being sent to the hostile domains controlled by the attackers.
As to how many credit cards were affected by the malware, the total number is unknown but the number of traffic numbers which were showed by the data company, TrafficEstimates, showed that the website had received about 350,000 visits per month.
If hypothetically speaking, 1 percent of the visitors used a credit card on their visit, then that means about 3,500 transactions monthly, or in another way, 21,000 transactions between the sox month period. If we can get a range of $4 to $21 per credit card information, then the cyber attackers behind the hack of the website might have gained close to $600,000 after the six months.
In one October post which revealed the hack to the Republican website, De Groot wrote that the clever skimming tactic had been working for six months without anyone noticing it. He also noted that the culprits were using a shell company in Belize, and their company had been growing exponentially.
Two days after the report, the website was disinfected, but there was not much hype about the infection and attacks of the website.
The issue of hacking in the election has been of high worry after the Democratic National Committee was hacked hours before their convention back in June. The hack led to the resignation of the former DNC chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has also been hacked before.