Blog P.I.

During the past holiday weekend, I came into the possession of some very interesting-looking computer screen captures. They were taken at ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising tool and website that for 2008 has matured into a legitimate vendor for two mainstream presidential campaigns.

And the pictures? The screen caps depict a major lapse in network security — one exposing certain member and donor information. In layman’s terms, they left the back door open all weekend. Earlier this afternoon I communicated with ActBlue executive director Ben Rahn, verifying the incident and gathering more information. Here is what went down, based on my limited reporting:

On Friday afternoon, a software developer’s error inadvertantly changed the network security settings, granting administrative-level access to occasional users (i.e., not every account). For example, if you are a normal user and you log in at normal times, this is what the top right-hand corner of the page will look like:

But if you are an administrator — or a normal user this weekend — the top right-hand corner of your page would have looked like:

Anyone who knew enough to be dangerous could get in and change settings or make the site do unpleasant things. But perhaps more worrisome, anyone could now access the Treasury database and start downloading sensitive donor information, in the form of CSV files, showing who had given to whom and how much.

I have a few of these screen shots, just enough to give an idea of what’s there without actually compromising ActBlue further. So, to start, if you click on that Admin link, you would find yourself at the Admin page:

From there it’s one more click to the Treasury Dashboard showing the actual bank accounts (account numbers blurred, incomplete though they are) ActBlue uses to manage the funds it receives:

And the candidates? Both John Edwards and Bill Richardson use ActBlue to collect their online donations. So here’s the Richardson page:

Note the “CSV data” in the furthest-right column. Aside from a prankster turning the site’s color scheme red, that’s where the real trouble lies.

There are a few reasons why this breach is not what it could have been. For one, as Rahn emphasized to me, “To be clear, credit card data is never available from the web site, and thus was never at risk of compromise.” Additionally, CSV (that’s comma-separated values) files can be a bit of a pain, especially if you don’t really know what you’re doing. And of course there is one thing that may have occurred to you already: All of this information will eventually be released to the FEC.

That said, there’s no telling what a rival campaign or unaffiliated opportunist savvy enough to collect and and synthesize this data could do. In the fundraising business, gathering data is difficult. Names, addresses and e-mails would be worth a lot of money to other candidates, political associations or other interested parties. Those names could be cross-referenced against existing lists of donors, and e-mail addresses of known political donors would be a hot property (even if “hot”). Any Senate data would be a huge bonus, because Senate candidates aren’t required to file electronic records with the FEC (and nobody wants to search thousands of PDFs).

So you never know. Maybe it’s something. Maybe it’s nothing. As Rahn told me today:

As it happens, we identified and resolved the problem Sunday morning; it was caused by a developer’s error on Friday afternoon. Your source’s findings essentially describe the “worst case scenario” [that could be caused by this error] … After resolving the prolem we combed through the logs of reports accessed during the window, and the most likely case is that reports were only accessed by those who should have seen them and perhaps a few curious users (such as your source) who might have explored a link they hadn’t seen before and done nothing with the data. However, there is no way for us to completely rule out the contrary cases.

And he assures me that they are “taking steps to ensure that this does not recur,” as one might imagine.

We’ve come a long way since Sandra Bullock pressed Esc and wound up getting chased around “The Net” by a clichéd British villain, and by now most of us are comfortable buying things and donating money online — despite the risks. Security errors are a fact of life. They will be a fact of political life, too.