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The Daily Beast reported that Russian hackers targeted the campaign of Sen. Claire McCaskill in the first identified attempt of Kremlin to interrupt the midterm election season. But, this attack wasn’t successful; it is disgraceful that Russia thinks it can get away with this. Missouri Democrat McCaskill said in a statement that “I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Putin is a thug and a bully”. It appears that Russia’s GRU intelligence agency was behind the attempted infiltration, which was carried out last August. The scheme was similar to one allegedly perpetrated by the GRU’s Fancy Bear hacker group against Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta in 2016. GRU allegedly sent emails to targets, claiming that they had to change their Microsoft Exchange password.

Each email had a different link that let the phony password change landing page display each recipient’s own email address, adding an air of legitimacy. The VP for customer security and trust of Microsoft, Tom Burt said last week that his company had detected phishing attempts against three midterm election candidates. He said at the Aspen Security Forum, “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”. Microsoft took down the site and Burt said the attack was unsuccessful. McCaskill is a long-term critic of Russia and is seen to be among the most vulnerable Democratic senators in a hotly contested midterm campaign.