Hawks’ website host who leaked announcement now blamed for Clinton/Sanders data breach

From FOX News, a software vendor is being blamed for a recent data breach that allowed the Bernie Sanders Campaign to access and potentially download Hillary Clinton voter research data:

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign reportedly has been punished by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for improperly accessing voter data compiled by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

and…

Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs placed the blame for the incident in large part on the vendor, NGP VAN.

“Sadly, the vendor who runs the DNC’s voter file program continues to make serious errors. On more than one occasion, the vendor has dropped the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns,” he said in a statement to Fox News. While saying it was “unacceptable” for a campaign staffer to access “some modeling data from another campaign,” he also said they want to work with the DNC and vendor to fix the “software flaws” that could make Sanders’ records vulnerable as well.

Another campaign official told the Post that the Clinton data was never downloaded or printed.

NGP VAN describes itself on its website as “the leading technology provider to Democratic and progressive campaigns.”

Read that here.

NGP VAN?  We’ve all heard of that company before! Because that’s the company hosting the website for the South Dakota sacrificial lamb Democrat challenger to Congresswoman Kristi Noem, Paula Hawks. And through their generosity, we all knew she was running long before she was prepared to make an announcement:

It looks like the months-late announcement of Paula Hawks being Democrats’ sacrificial lamb candidate to run against Congresswoman Kristi Noem is nigh.

Tonight I was able to grab these screen captures of her campaign web site (with logo) from http://www.hawksforhouse.com, which much like Hawks herself, is severely in need of substance to go along with her ambition..

and…

Read the entire bio here, before they go back to the drawing board.

Read that here.

My post was dated July 26th, and if you look at the “read the entire bio” link above, you’ll see it was being developed and is still hosted on NGP VAN servers.

How did my “team of hackers” divine this super-secret information?  Seriously, I just did a google search on Paula Hawks, and there the links for the development site were there for God and the world to see. NGP VAN’s sloppy posting of the the information, and the information which came out had the Argus Leader editorial staff defining the Hawks campaign roll out as “Amateur Hour,”  and gave the impression that her campaign is inept.

And given her performance in fundraising, publicity, and even putting out a message on social media, the label is going to be hard for her to shake.   (She’s only had 1 tweet so far for this month, BTW.)

I would not be shocked to hear that the “low level staffer” for Sanders who took the fall for this, didn’t do anything more nefarious than substitute “Clinton” for “Sanders” in some directory listing or website URL, or something as basic as that, and had all their data pop up on the screen.

Interesting stuff.