Tim Ryan, tryan@wolfrivermedia.com
Could Shawano County be holding tantalizing secret information that Russian President Vladimir Putin would like to get his hands on?
Well, probably not.
Yet officials at the Shawano County Democratic Party say they learned recently that Russia’s alleged hack of the Democratic National Committee — or near-certain hack, based on the intelligence community’s assessment — filtered down through state and congressional party computer systems to the grass-roots level across the country, including Shawano County.
“On the county level, our computers were part of the hack,” said Dan Weidner, first vice chairman of the county Democratic Party.
Weidner said state party officials learned about three weeks ago that the system had been compromised at the state level because of the DNC hack, and that the worm set in motion was crawling down through the system.
“The hack wormed its way through the national system,” he said. “It surprised us that it was that extensive.”
The impact on local Democratic organizations has not gotten much attention as part of the national Russian hacking story, but, Weidner said, the DNC and FBI investigating the original hacking incident only recently discovered how widespread it was.
“It’s a virus that was crawling through the system,” he said, “and we’re at the tail end.”
Like most county Democratic Party offices in northeast Wisconsin, Shawano County’s network is linked through Brown County to the 8th Congressional District, which is linked to the state, which is linked to the national party system.
The local party now finds itself part of a systemwide purge of the virus set off at the national level.
“It will cost about $300 locally to fix the damage,” Weidner said.
That’s not a huge financial burden for the Shawano County party, according to Weidner.
“We’ve got a decent financial situation, so we can handle it,” he said. “Others will be strained.”
The local Democratic Party will have to switch out of the security system it had been using and become part of a broader party network under a professional security firm, Weidner said.
Though the 8th Congressional District and state Democratic Party will pick up much of those set-up costs, it will cost the local party about $100 a year to run it.
“It’s not much, but it’s another expense to think about,” Weidner said.
He said the Shawano County party assumed its existing security measures were sufficient.
“We weren’t planning on a sophisticated hack from a foreign government,” he said.
Weidner said it’s unlikely Shawano County was specifically targeted.
“What are they going to get? Our newsletter? Pictures of our brat fry?” he joked. “‘Look at all the brats that guy’s eating, we could blackmail him.’”
Weidner said the local party’s financials are also already pretty transparent and wouldn’t need hacking to access. There is one thing officials would like to keep confidential — their voting list.
Access to that could allow a hacker to feed fake information to individual voters or even divert financial contributions, he said.
Weidner said it’s not clear whether any information was actually accessed or downloaded during the hacking.
“We just know somebody was in the system,” he said. “This will be a major problem for the party.”