Remember the attempted Russian hack of the DNC from about a week ago?

Well, never mind:

What the Democratic National Committee this week thought was an attempted hack of its valuable voter file turned out to be a security test organized by a state party, unbeknown to the national organization.

The committee on Tuesday alerted the FBI to a fake online portal it thought had been set up as an elaborate attempt to trick DNC staff into giving up their log-in credentials — through a hacking technique known as “phishing” — as a way to gain access to the party’s VoteBuilder database.

Late Wednesday night, DNC Chief Security Officer Bob Lord reversed course. “We, along with the partners who reported the [fake] site, now believe it was built by a third party as part of a simulated phishing test on VoteBuilder,” he said in a statement. 

………

The mix-up resulted from a state Democratic organization seeking to test employees’ ability to avoid falling prey to phishing attempts.

The test was conducted at the behest of the Michigan Democratic Party, using “white-hat” security personnel with the group DigiDems, who provided their services to create the mock site, a Democratic official said. The state party did not notify the national committee or NGP, the firm that hosts the voter database, the official said.

There is actually a deeper problem here:  The party apparatus in general, and the DNC have become completely dependent on overpriced (and under-performing) outside consultants, and as a result, they have no internal expertise to provide even a basic evaluation of potential problems.