After receiving a deluge of obscene voicemails and text messages, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi informed Democrats on Saturday of “an electronic Watergate break-in” and warned them not to allow family members to answer their phones or read incoming texts.
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This leak isn’t as embarrassing as the Democratic National Committee documents WikiLeaks released last month.
Pelosi said she’s changing her phone number and urged her colleagues to do the same. “This is a sad course of events, not only for us, but more importantly for our country”, said Pelosi, who earlier in the week blamed Russian Federation for the cyber attack and called it an “electronic Watergate” akin to the 1972 burglary at Democratic Party headquarters that ultimately brought down Republican President Richard Nixon.
The cellphone numbers of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland were among the information posted. She describes them as “mostly obscene and sick calls, voicemails and text messages”.
Micro-blogging website Twitter suspended the account of Guccifer 2.0 – a hacker (or hackers) who compromised Democratic National Committee’s (DCC) computer network and leaked its emails – on Saturday, after it revealed a cache of information stolen in a cyber-assault.
The hacker said the USA presidential elections “are becoming a farce”, citing the earlier breach of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) which revealed that lawmakers may have been partial to Hillary Clinton in the primaries, and, according to Guccifer, shows that “everything is being settled behind the scenes”.
Nancy Pelosi suggested other House Democrats to do the same in order to prevent the same thing happening to them.
Pelosi said the hack of personal information was “a sad course of events” for her party but “more importantly for our country”.
The FBI, which is investigating, hasn’t publicly attributed the attack to Russian Federation.
CrowdStrike was the first to analyze the Democratic National Committee hack and brought in three independent cybersecurity firms to examine parts of malware that infected computers belonging to the party’s national committee.
Pelosi said the chief information security officer of the House, in coordination with Capitol Police, has sent communications to those people whose email addresses have been made public about how to address the problem.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who began publishing thousands of the emails last month, has said there is “no proof” Russian Federation was behind the hack.
According to PBS, Pelosi sent a letter to fellow House Democrats, urging them to change their numbers.
An investigation into the cyberattack on the DCCC, the official campaign arm for House Democrats, is ongoing but investigators have said “this is similar to other recent incidents, including the DNC breach”, Kelly said in a statement to ABC News in late July. Former DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepped down after that one.
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Another Democrat affected, U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, said in a statement that he hoped that those responsible will be identified and that the White House will disclose “who is attempting to interfere with the American political process, and levy strong consequences against those responsible”.
