The Democratic National Committee suspended presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders' access to the party's voter database after one of the Vermont senator's staffers accessed data belong to a rival's campaign.
The Democratic National Committee suspended presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders' access to the party's voter database after one of the Vermont senator's staffers accessed data belong to a rival's campaign.
The database, first reported by The Washington Post as belonging to Hillary Clinton's campaign, contains nationwide information about voters, and the breach took place after NGP VAN, the technology company that runs the database that helps set campaign strategies, experienced a technical glitch.
"This was an isolated incident, and we're conducting a full audit to ensure the integrity of the system and reporting the findings to the DNC.," Stu Trevelyan, NGP VAN's chief executive, told The New York Times.
The staffer who viewed the data was fired, the Sanders campaign confirmed.
Michael Briggs, Sanders' communications director, blamed NGP VAN for repeatedly dropping the firewall between the data of different Democratic campaigns even after the Sanders campaign informed the DNC months ago that the campaign data was being compromised. "At that time our campaign did not run to the media, relying instead on assurances from the vendor," he said in a statement.
Briggs said the vendor once again dropped the firewall on Wednesday, and after discussion with the DNC, it became clear that a Sanders staffer accessed modeling data from another campaign. Briggs called the behavior "unacceptable."
"We are as interested as anyone in making sure that the software flaws are corrected since mistakes by the DNC's vendor also have made our records vulnerable," Briggs said. "We are working with the DNC and the vendor and hope that this kind of lapse will not occur again."
Sanders is due to face Clinton in a Democratic primary debate on Saturday.
Luis Miranda, the DNC's communications director, said NGP VAN notified the party on Wednesday that, as a result of a software patch, all users on the system across Democratic campaigns were inadvertently able to access some data belonging to other campaigns for a brief window.
"The DNC places a high priority on maintaining the security of our system and protecting the data on it," Miranda said in a statement. "We are working with our campaigns and the vendor to have full clarity on the extent of the breach, ensure that this isolated incident does not happen again, and to enable our campaigns to continue engaging voters on the issues that matter most to them and their families."
The DNC says it instructed NGP VAN to immediately suspend the credentials of the campaign that inappropriately accessed data until a full explanation is received and proof is provided to the affected campaign that information and data inappropriately gathered has been disposed of. The DNC is also looking at the option of an independent audit by a data security firm in addition to the full audit of the system the committee has instructed NGP VAN to conduct.
