Russian spies said to hack Clinton’s campaign

The attack comes amid accusations that the nation may be meddling in elections

WASHINGTON — Computer systems used by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign were hacked in an attack that appears to have come from Russia’s intelligence services, a federal law enforcement official said Friday.

The apparent breach, coming after the disclosure last month that the Democratic National Committee’s computer system had been compromised, escalates an international episode in which Clinton campaign officials have suggested that Russia might be trying to sway the outcome of the election.

Ms. Clinton’s campaign said in a statement that intruders had gained access to an analytics program used by the campaign and maintained by the national committee, but it said that it did not believe that the campaign’s own internal computer systems had been compromised.

Nick Merrill said in a statement that “an analytics data program maintained by the DNC and used by our campaign and a number of other entities was accessed as part of the DNC hack.”

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the fundraising arm for House Democrats, also said Friday that its systems had been hacked. Together, the databases of the national committee and the House organization contain some of the party’s most sensitive communications and voter and financial data.

The attack on the Democratic House committee’s system appears to have come from an entity known as “Fancy Bear,” which is connected to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence service, according to an official involved in the forensic investigation.

The same arm of Russia’s intelligence operation was also implicated in the attack on the national committee, in which it gained access to opposition research on Republicans, including on the party’s presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

“It’s the same adversary,” the official involved in the forensic investigation said. “These are sophisticated actors.”

The FBI said Friday that it was examining reports of “cyberintrusions involving multiple political entities” but did not identify the targets of the attacks.

The reports of attacks against Democratic Party organizations began in mid-June, when the Democratic National Committee said its computer systems had been breached by two groups of Russian hackers working for competing government intelligence agencies. After that breach, WikiLeaks last week released some 20,000 committee emails, many of them embarrassing to Democratic officials.

U.S. intelligence agencies have told the White House they have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee. But it is unclear whether the break-in was fairly routine espionage or part of an effort to manipulate the election.