The email that would help Democrats lose the 2016 presidential election arrived on March 19, 2016, signed — seemingly harmlessly — “Best, the Gmail team.” The email was sent to John Podesta, the then-chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. But it wasn’t a benign message; it was actually a spear-phishing email authored by hackers with ties to Russia. “There was a Google alert that there was some compromise in the system,” Podesta told CNN of the email, which prompted Podesta to change his password “immediately” by clicking on a link. “It actually got managed by my assistant, who checked with our cybersecurity guy,” Podesta said. “And through a comedy of errors, I guess, he instructed her to go ahead and click on it and she did.”
The fatal error? Podesta’s IT person wrote back to his assistant calling the email “legitimate” when in fact he meant to say it was “illegitimate.”
One typo, one click — and Russian hackers had gained free reign into the email of the man running Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “The rest,” Podesta said, “is history.”
That fake Gmail alert was one of a series of cyber intrusions that US intelligence would later determine formed a coordinated and unprecedented Russian “influence operation” to interfere with the US election. Through a series of interviews with government officials and cybersecurity experts, CNN details exactly how that operation happened.
Full Article: How one typo helped let Russian hackers in – CNNPolitics.com.