THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And as most candidates are finding out, it takes money and expertise to counter the hackers and campaigns don't have enough money and too many people lacking the knowledge to keep it safe.

With some 40 days remaining to the crucial midterm elections, signs of digital meddling in campaigns are mounting. But most candidates have spent little or nothing on cybersecurity, and say it’s too hard and expensive to focus on hacking threats with all the other demands of running for office.

Only six candidates for U.S. House and Senate spent more than $1,000 on cybersecurity through the most recent Federal Election Commission filing period.

Yet those who monitor intrusions and digital mayhem say hackers are active. And various reports cite at least three candidates still in races or ousted in primaries were suffering attempted breaches of their campaigns.

“We get things literally every day to my team … to investigate everything from phishing attacks to ‘We think our data was breached’ to ‘We think there was a denial of service attack’ to ‘Someone’s listening on our cell phones.’ So we get, like, the whole range of things every single day,” said Raffi Krikorian, chief technology officer for the Democratic National Committee, the party’s governing body.

Even candidates deeply schooled in cybersecurity said the intense 24/7 nature of campaigning leaves them little time to raise money and buy technology to secure their cell phones, email networks and computers.

Jay Hulings , who ran for a U.S. House seat in West Texas’s 23rd Congressoinal District, knew that cybersecurity was important. Hulings had been a federal prosecutor and general counsel to the House intelligence committee, privy to classified secrets.

When Hulings mounted his campaign, he told his bare-bones staff to communicate through Signal, an encrypted messaging app, and avoid using email. Then reality sunk in. The staff expanded and the pace quickened.

“Raising money is hard, and you have to spend it on signs and staff and TV ads and radio and all the typical campaign things. So I don’t think we spent anything on cybersecurity,” he said, explaining how his staff eventually started using Gmail.

“You’re taking 22- and 23-year olds who are just doing something fun before they go to grad school. You don’t have time to train,” Hulings recalled.

In some cases, candidates downplay the likelihood that they could be targeted by Chinese, Russian or other foreign hackers.

“Most campaigns are not going to have a highly sophisticated foreign entity trying to hack into your campaign network unless you are a U.S. senator. On the House side, there’s too many to deal with unless it’s very high profile,” said Rep. Barry Loudermilk, a Georgia Republican who has an information technology background.

But Russian trolls did get involved in local Florida protests about a natural gas pipeline from Alabama to Florida., encouraging people through fake accounts on social media to get involved.

Rep. Jim Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat who co-founded the congressional cybersecurity caucus, said the threat from hackers is everpresent and growing: “There are only those people who have been hacked and those people who don’t realize they’ve been hacked.”

Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats cautioned in mid-July that “the warning lights are blinking red again” over possible foreign intrusions and that Russian hackers are undertaking “aggressive attempts to manipulate social media” around midterm campaigns.

Around the same time, Microsoft said it had detected and helped the U.S. government thwart hacking attempts against three congressional candidates without identifying them.

Like fleas and Republicans, hackers are everywhere and damned difficult to get rid of.