• Participant hold their laptops in front of an illuminated wall at the annual Chaos Computer Club (CCC) computer hackers' congress, called 29C3, on December 28, 2012 in Hamburg, Germany.

Participant hold their laptops in front of an illuminated wall at the annual Chaos Computer Club (CCC) computer hackers' congress, called 29C3, on December 28, 2012 in Hamburg, Germany. (Photo : Getty Images/Patrick Lux)

Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta played a key role in the email hack catastrophe of the Democratic National Committee. It turns out that the problem was due to a typo sent by one of his aides.

Hacking attempts are normal across the globe but some black hat hackers tend to want to take down larger targets. In the case of the Podesta email hack, they wanted to dig some dirt in Clinton's campaign for presidency at the time.

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Authorities in the United States believe that the whole hack stemmed from a phishing attack. A fake account reset form was sent to Podesta who referred to his aide named Charles Delavan, The Verge reported. Delavan aimed to type that the email was illegitimate but he ended up typing legitimate.

Podesta then filled out the fake phishing form and hackers were able to open his email account which hurt the Clinton campaign. Other hackers also used the information found in Podesta's email to remotely wipe his iPad and iPhone just to inconvenience the man.

Phishing attacks usually fool their victims with an identical web page where they are asked to fill out a form or a login screen. After inputting the login credentials, they are either redirected to the true page to prevent suspicion. However, their credentials are now stolen by the hackers.

U.S. intelligence officials believe that hackers from Russia just wanted to gather intel but their efforts shifted to harming Clinton's presidency campaign, New York Times reported. Part of the blame was because some officials were slow to respond and often underestimated the cyberattacks aimed at them.

The Podesta email hack is just one of the many that shocked the world. Average Internet users can still take precautions to be extra safe by double checking the sources of emails and to see whether the web address on their browsers are not sketchy.

Find out more about the Podesta email in the video below: