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Caught Our Eye

Rep. Johnson's unicorns, demons and greasers

Posted by Keturah Hetrick on March 29, 2018

"Facts about Unicorn." "Demonic Attacks Real." "A short history of the greasers."

These aren't the press releases a campaign would normally issue. Yet these headlines topped dozens of bizarre news items appearing on Rep. Bill Johnson's (R-Ohio) re-election website before the campaign finally recovered control from hackers last week.

The problem started when the campaign switched to a new website vender, who issued the campaign a temporary password that was "not as secure as it could have been" and that the campaign did not change, according to Johnson campaign adviser Matt Dole. Hackers took advantage of the weak password, and a bot began posting from an RSS feed to the site's "News" section.

A campaign staffer noticed the problem, deleted the strange posts and changed the site's password to "something more secure" early last week, says Dole. LegiStorm first noticed the issue more than two weeks ago, by which time dozens of strange press releases had appeared.