Rauner told “The Big John and Ray Show” on WLS, that while the Board of Elections is a separate entity and not a part of state government, his administration wants to help investigate, saying “We’ve got a very sophisticated new team for information technology inside state government and they are offering to help investigate exactly how the hacking occurred”. Cybersecurity experts almost unanimously point to Russian military and intelligence community hackers as the source.
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The FBI issued an alert to local election officials across the US earlier this month advising them to ramp up cyber security measures after uncovering evidence that hackers breached two state election networks this summer, Yahoo News reported Monday morning. On Monday, Illinois officials said hackers stole data from up to 200,000 voter records, although they told the Chicago Tribune that none of the records had been deleted or altered.
The database in IL included the names, addresses, birthdates and sex of voters.
The hacks, at least one of which is believed to be carried out by Russians, led both states to shut down their systems for a week.
After taking the registration system offline, it was discovered that an official’s username and password had been posted online.
In Arizona, officials took the voting registration system offline after the Federal Bureau of Investigation alerted the agency that there was a cyber threat to the system.
The breaches are causing concern among election officials because of the voter personal information that could have been stolen, not because of any fear that an election could be stolen, law enforcement officials say.
The FBI’s August 18 warning also came just days after Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson hosted a call with secretaries of state and other state election officials to talk about cybersecurity and election infrastructure.
In a conference call with state election officials, Johnson did inform them of basic cyber security hygiene practices, including the disconnection of electronic voting machines from the internet while ballots are being cast. On July 27, Barak Obama said there was a possibility that Kremlin tried to affect the results of the USA elections.
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IL voting machines are not connected to the internet in any way, according to Menzel. In some large counties, such as Cook County, at the end of the voting day, early unofficial voting results are reported back and sent via cellphone signal but they have encryption protection.
