The Election Season Hack You Never Heard About

Somehow, a man named Imran Awan, his younger brothers Abid and Jamal, his friend Rao Abbas, and his wife Hina (Imran was a polygamist married to both Hina and Sumaira) were all on the congressional payroll as computer systems administrators. Each worked part-time for around eight members of Congress, forty-four in total. Their job was to configure servers, set up email accounts, and purchase phones and desktops for the offices. The problem is they were also logging onto the servers of other members of Congress who they didn't work for. They were logging in using members of Congress' personal usernames. They were funneling massive amounts of data off the network. They were accessing the House Democratic Caucus server with a bizarre frequency—five thousand times within a few months. And they used elaborate digital techniques to conceal what they were doing.