Coleman Senate campaign in donor data leak mess

This is a screenshot of the e-mail Coleman's campaign sent to supporters warning them about the data leak.

(Credit: Minnesota Independent)

The campaign of Republican Norm Coleman, who is engaged in a fierce legal battle to keep his Senate seat from Democrat Al Franken, has warned supporters that their credit card numbers may have been exposed on the Internet.

His campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, said the office became aware of a possible security breach of the donor database in January, however an investigation found the data had not been accessed by an unauthorized party, according to a report on Wednesday in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune.

Supporters received an e-mail from the nonprofit Wikileaks site on Tuesday night saying the Coleman campaign had leaked donor information and that it was on the Wikileaks Web site, as well as another e-mail providing some of the data in a spreadsheet as evidence, the report says. The spreadsheet contained information for more than 4,700 donors. But Wikileaks said it has data on more than 51,600 Coleman contacts.

Sheehan e-mailed supporters on Wednesday urging them to cancel their credit cards and hinted at political espionage. Coleman has asked federal authorities to investigate, according to the Star Tribune.

A report in The Minnesota Independent quotes an IT professional who says she was testing the security of the campaign's Web site in January and was easily able to access data without hacking.

IT consultant Adria Richards said she got the site's IP address by entering "colemanforsenate.com" into an OpenDNS cache-check tool, and then copied the IP address into a Firefox browser to reveal the Web site directories for colemanforsenate.com, the report says. She then posted a screen capture of what she found online and wrote about the security problems on her blog.

Richards began her investigative computer work after Coleman's campaign was accused of falsely claiming that its Web site crashed after being overwhelmed by traffic from people who were allegedly disenfranchised voters.

Coleman is challenging Franken's lead of 225 votes, following a recount. The case is being heard by a special three-judge panel. Closing arguments are expected to begin Friday in the trial, which has gone on for seven weeks.

[RF373]

Norm has a lot of problems with data apparently. Credit card numbers, election results...

Take hike Coleman, the party you rubberstamped is out. You, defeated by rookie Al Franken

[jafinnie]

If democRATS would quit hacking other peoples systems and cheating, there wouldn't be any problems like this. Frankin won nothing, in fact he got his clock cleaned. He got votes from car trunks and had military votes disalowed which is the only reason he is still in the game. Frankin is a tax cheat and a screaming liar. He isn't even funny anymore and hasn't been for a long time. But I forget, democRATS don't have to pay taxes, just us low life do.

[websterphreaky]

My my my .... sounds like Barry Obummer's little SS Shock Troopers have been up to the usual Chicago style political shenanigans. You would expect any less from the party that brought you "Hope" you like Socialism and "Change" your life into misery in just the just 60 days!!??

It's time for a big Tea Party, and the dunking will be the Democommunist Party

[brickman5721]

Couldn't agree more.

[ExWinUser]

What do you expect, Republicans don't know anything about SECURITY!

[websterphreaky]

Looks like " ExWinUser" is an ******* and a Socialist Commucrat ..... Mac users are always Lefty Retards, which is ironic because Mac OS X has had ten times more Security Holes patches for the TINY Minority of the OS market they are (< 5%) than Windows XP and Vista.