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Russian hackers targeted the 2008 Barack Obama campaign and U.S. government officials as far back as 2007 and have continued to attack them since they left their government jobs, according to a new report scheduled for release Friday.

The targets included several of the 2008 Obama campaign field managers as well as the presidents closest White House aides and senior officials in the Defense, State and Energy Departments, the report says.

It names several officials by title, but not by name, including several officials involved in Russian policy, including a U.S. ambassador to Russia, according to a draft version of the report, authored by Area 1 Security, a Redwood, California company founded by former NSAveterans.

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Theyre still getting fresh attacks, the company says.

The attacks on their email accounts have continued as the officials migrated to think tanks, universities and private industry, the company says. The favored weapon of the Russians and other hackers is the so-called phishing email, in which the recipient is invited to click on a innocent-looking link which opens a door to the attackers.

U.S. President Barack Obama, right, meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Los Cabos, Mexico, on June 18, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed

Michael McFaul, Obamas ambassador to Russia from 2011 to 2014, told Newsweek Thursday that he gets frequent warnings of phishing attacks by an unnamed foreign government from both his Google email service and Stanford University, where he is now a professor of political science. He says his colleagues, assistants and people like that at Stanford also get attacked on a fairly regular basis.

Read more: Russia's greatest weapon may be its hackers

I have not been successfully penetrated, to the best of my knowledge, McFaul said in a brief telephone interview. So far as he knows, I have not been compromised. There were three other U.S. ambassadors to Russia during Obamas eight years in office who could not immediately be reached for comment.

The role of Russia in attacks on the 2008 campaigns of Obama and his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, has not been previously reported. On the eve of a U.S.-China summit meeting in 2013, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News that Beijing alone was responsible for a 2008 cyber attack on the Obama and McCain campaigns.

China cant be excluded as a perpetrator in those attacks, Area 1 Securitys report says, but its new data show that Russia tried to hack several members of the Obama campaign and could have done so at the same time as someone that achieved massive data exfiltration.

Blake Darch, a former NSA technical analyst who co-founded Area 1 Security, tells Newsweek that "state-sponsored Russian hackers have been targeting United States officials and politicians since at least 2007 through phishing attacks." Russian hackers reportedly breached the Joint Chiefs of Staff email system in 2015.

The company said one of the Russian targets was a deputy campaign manager in the 2008 Obama campaign, but was otherwise unidentified in its report. There were a number of them over a period of time. One was Steve Hildebrand. Reached in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where he now runs a speciality bakery and coffee shop, Hildebrand says he was not aware that he might have been a Russian target and didnt remember being warned about cyberattacks of any kind during the campaign. Another senior 2008 campaign aide (and later White House National Security Council spokesman), Tommy Vietor, tells Newsweek he had no knowledge of Russian hacking at the time.

Besides top officials in the Energy, Defense and State departments, the Area 1 Security report cites a half dozen positions in the Obama White House that were targeted from 2008 through 2016, including the presidents deputy assistant, special assistant, the special assistant to the political director, advance team leaders for First Lady Michelle Obama, and the White House deputy counsel. None of them could immediately be reached for comment.

Among the State Department targets named by Area 1 Security were three top offices dealing with Russia and Europe. Evelyn Farkas, who served as Obama administration's deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia/Ukraine/Eurasia during 2015-2015, said she could not discuss matters that remain classified, but said the biggest impact she remembered offhand was the Russian hack of the Joint Chiefs.

Among the three top, unnamed targets at the Energy Department was the director of the Office of Nuclear Threat Science, which is is responsible for overseeing the U.S. Nuclear Counterterrorism Program.

The Area 1 Security report names the Dukes, also known as Cozy Bear and APT-29, for the Obama attacks, the same Russian actors named in the 2015 and 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the State Department.

In an interview, Darch called the Dukes a front for Russias premier intelligence-gathering arm, which would be the SVR, or External Intelligence Service, the Kremlin equivalent to the CIA, although he declined to specifically name it. As opposed to the DNC hacks launched to steal and publicize information damaging to the campaign of Hillary Clinton, he said, the Russian offensives that Area 1 Security uncovered were clandestine intelligence gathering operations designed to secretly penetrate a wide variety of institutions and industry.

Clinton had harshly criticized the Kremlins suppression of human rights and seizure of the Crimea, while her rival Donald Trump had repeatedly said he wanted to be friends with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Oren Falkowitz, a former analyst at the National Security Agency who co-founded Area 1 Security, says he launched the company to stop phishing attacks, which until then was thought to be impossible because so many employees continue to click on risky links in emails. The key to the companys success was persuading clients to let it monitor its servers, he told The New York Times in a 2016 interview.

In Fridays report, Area 1 Security says it uses a vast active sensor network to detect and trace phishing attacks. It said it could imagine the Dukes operating a giant spreadsheet where new targets are added, but never leave It moves quickly, compromising a server or service to send out phishing emails from it, and then leaves, never returning to check for bounced email messages to cull from its list.

Most ex-officials dont realize they are carrying the blemish of being a Russian target into their new workplace, the Area 1 Security report says. As a result, they give the Dukes beachheads in companies and organizations they never even planned on or imagined hacking, such as Washington think tanks, defense contractors, lobbyist offices, financial institutions and pharmaceutical companies stocked with high ranking former political, military and intelligence officials.

Russia is notoriously persistent in pursuing targets, the report says. Its a lesson on why every organization needs great security.

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Exclusive: Russian Hackers Attacked the 2008 Obama Campaign - Newsweek