The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the incident, one of the officials said. 
 
 “This attempt is further proof that there are constant threats as we head into midterm elections, and we must remain vigilant in order to prevent future attacks,” said Bob Lord, chief security officer for the Democratic National Committee. He called the voter file “the party’s most sensitive information.” 
 
 The combination of this attack on the committee, continued influence operations by Russia and others using social media, and efforts to breach think tanks underscores that the cyber age has changed elections forever. So many systems are vulnerable to manipulation, from the voter-registration systems in the 50 states to the inner workings of the parties, that the opportunities for foreign and domestic manipulation are many. 
 
 “The focus has gone from using the cyber realm to steal secrets to using it to impose national power,” Rob Joyce, the White House cybersecurity coordinator until the position was eliminated a few months ago, said this month at Defcon, an annual convention that focuses on hacking and defenses against it. 
 
 Ahead of the midterms, political groups and government organizations have been on high alert for new hacks and foreign meddling. Microsoft said this week that it had detected that hackers tied to Russian intelligence targeted the Senate and conservative think tanks in the United States, also by creating fake websites. 
 
 And after Facebook last month identified a political influence campaign aimed at potentially disrupting the midterms, the company said this week that it had uncovered other disinformation efforts targeting people around the world. ||||| (CNN) Update: The Democratic National Committee said late Wednesday that what it had earlier feared was the beginning of a sophisticated attempt to hack into its voter database, was, in fact, an unauthorized "simulated phishing test." Read the updated story here. 
 
 The Democratic National Committee contacted the FBI on Tuesday after it detected what it believes was the beginning of a sophisticated attempt to hack into its voter database, a Democratic source tells CNN. 
 
 The DNC was alerted in the early hours of Tuesday morning by a cloud service provider and a security research firm that a fake login page had been created in an attempt to gather usernames and passwords that would allow access to the party's database, the source said. 
 
 The DNC and the two companies involved in detecting the operation say they believe they thwarted a potential attack. 
 
 The fraudulent page was designed to look like the access page Democratic Party officials and campaigns across the country use to log into a service called Votebuilder, which hosts the database, the source said, adding the DNC believed it was designed to trick people into handing over their login details. 
 
 Read More
– The FBI is reportedly investigating a sophisticated—but unsuccessful—attempt to hack into the Democratic National Committee's voter database. The DNC learned of the attempt on Tuesday, CNN reports. The attack, which was detected by a cloud service provider and a security research company, involved a fake login page intended to gather usernames and passwords for a service called Votebuilder, which hosts the DNC's voter database. It's a method called "spearphishing," according to the New York Times. "It was very convincing," Mike Murray of the cybersecurity firm Lookout tells CNN, adding that it would be tough to tell the real page from the fake one, even if they were side-by-side. The fake login page was ultimately removed by the cloud hosting company DigitalOcean. The company's chief security officer says the threat was identified before the attack was launched. "We see no evidence that any sensitive data was stolen," he says. A DNC official tells the Times that it is not clear who the hackers were in this case. But, the paper recalls, a 2016 hack of the DNC was ultimately traced to Russia. This latest attempt, DNC Chief Security Officer Bob Lord tells the Times, "is further proof that there are constant threats as we head into midterm elections and we must remain vigilant in order to prevent future attacks." Earlier this week, Microsoft reported that it had uncovered new Russian hacking attempts targeting conservative organizations in the US.