Can the Guy Who Fixed Twitter’s Fail Whale Save the DNC?

Raffi Krikorian was asleep in a Chicago hotel room at around midnight one Wednesday in August when his phone buzzed. Krikorian, who had become chief technology officer of the Democratic National Committee about a year earlier, was in town for the committee’s summer meeting. He was feeling sick, so when his colleagues headed to the bar he turned in, hoping to get some rest. The call was from Bob Lord, whom Krikorian had recently hired to lead security for the DNC. As Lord talked, Krikorian realized he’d have to scrap his plans for a restful evening.

According to Lord, someone had set up a fake version of Votebuilder, a tool run by the Democratic data firm NGP VAN, using gift cards to pay for the servers in order to cloak their identity. It looked like the first step of a ploy to dupe staffers into sharing their passwords. A similar attack in 2016 had let to the release of embarrassing internal documents, and—by some accounts—had tipped the presidential election in favor of Donald Trump.