A report released on Tuesday by the Center for Public Integrity says Chinese hackers attacked the Federal Election Commission (FEC) website that contains records of donations received and spent by federal candidates.
The attacks, which occurred after October 1 during the government shutdown, came on the heels of warnings from independent auditors that the FEC information system was rickety and at “high risk” for an attack. But the FEC blasted the findings and claimed they were not vulnerable because their “systems are secure.”
“The FEC is rotting from the inside out,” wrote Dave Levinthal on the Center for Public Integrity blog.
The Chinese hacking of the FEC website occurred nearly a year after the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) released its explosive 108-page report–“America The Vulnerable: Are Foreign And Fraudulent Online Campaign Contributions Influencing U.S. Elections?”–which revealed that Obama.com is not owned by the Obama campaign but rather by Obama bundler Robert Roche, a U.S. citizen living in Shanghai, China with ties to state-controlled banks.