A typo might have cost Clinton the election

A series of painfully preventable errors committed by the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton's staff led to Russian hackers gaining access to the Democrats' private accounts, possibly costing them the election, The New York Times reports. "What started as an information-gathering operation, intelligence officials believe, ultimately morphed into an effort to harm one candidate, Hillary Clinton, and tip the election to her opponent, Donald J. Trump," the Times writes.

The FBI was aware as early as September 2015 that at least one computer system belonging to the DNC had been compromised. But when FBI agent Adrian Hawkins called the committee's tech-support contractor, Yared Tamene, to inform him of the situation, Tamene did not return Hawkins' calls because "I had no way of differentiating the call I just received from a prank call," he wrote in a memo.

In the spring, a similar communication failure allowed the Russians access to all of John Podesta's emails. Podesta, who was serving as the chairman of the Clinton campaign at the time, received a classic phishing email allegedly from Google telling him his Gmail password was compromised and that he ought to reset it:

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Read more about how the Russians gained access to the DNC's emails — and possibly put their thumb on the scales of the American election — at The New York Times.