Scammers, hackers and spies hit campaign trail

Political campaigns are uniquely vulnerable to hackers, criminals and ideological foes, campaign operatives and cybersecurity experts say.

At the same time, a top-notch data mining operation is essential to modern political operations, and candidates and parties are collecting and keeping more personal information on every voter than ever before. Recent years have seen more and more mischief in cyber-campaign land. Data breaches and misplaced donor or voter information can fall into the wrong hands. Foreign intelligence services have reportedly found their way into campaign servers. Hackers looking to embarrass politicians have altered campaign websites. And credit card scammers have found that making small donations are a great way to test stolen MasterCard and Visa numbers.