House Sergeant-At-Arms Paul Irving banned the Awans from the congressional network on Feb. 2, 2017 after the IG report alleged that the Awans were making “unauthorized access” to House servers.
They logged in using members of Congress’s personal usernames and logged into servers of members for whom they did not work, the IG report said. After some members fired them, they still kept accessing their data, an IG presentation charged.
The behavior mirrored a “classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization,” and “steps are being taken [by the Awans] to conceal their activity,” it said.
In the months before the election,
the epicenter of the cyberbreach was the server of the House Democratic Caucus, a sister group of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). Authorities said they believe Imran secretly moved all the data of more than a dozen House members’ offices onto the caucus server.
The server may have been “used for nefarious purposes and elevated the risk that individuals could be reading and/or removing information,” an IG presentation said. The Awans logged into it 27 times a day, far more than any other computer they administered.
Imran’s most forceful advocate and longtime employer is Florida Democratic Rep.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who led the DNC until she resigned following a hack that exposed committee emails. Wikileaks published those emails, and they show that DNC staff summoned Imran when they needed her password.
Democrats have blamed the DNC hack for former Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential race.
Soon after the IG report, the entire House Democratic Caucus server was physically stolen, three government officials said, in what authorities took as evidence tampering. Then-Caucus Chairman
Xavier Becerra has refused to discuss the incident except to say that he would cooperate with authorities.
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The separation between the legislative and executive branch has complicated the prosecution. Congressmen have refused to publicly address the IG’s findings, and Wasserman Schultz’s brother is a prosecutor in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, which is handling the case.
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The suspects worked for foreign affairs committee members such as
Ted Lieu of California and for intelligence committee members Joaquin Castro of Texas, Andre Carson of Indiana, and Jackie Speier of California. All have ignored repeated requests for comment.
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