This is the eight-point threat on a scale from 1 to 10, according to Washington Post.
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Ira Victor also weighed in on the debate over the feds should have more control over the election system.
He said that all these circumstances merit a thorough FBI investigation to determine if Russian Federation is trying to influence the election. Bureau officials on Monday declined to comment. The federal alert warns of possible future cyber intrusions by Russian hackers who have already gotten into the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign systems. US officials suspect that hack was carried out by Russian government hackers.
The Russian campaign is also sparking intense anxiety about the security of this year’s elections.
Also on Monday, a leaked Federal Bureau of Investigation bulletin revealed that hackers had recently targeted two unnamed state election systems.
According to The New York Times, the leader of the Democratic minority in the Senate Harry Reid believes that Russian Federation has set a target to falsify the results of the upcoming November 8 general election in the United States.
The state shut down the system for nine days beginning in late June, after the discovery of malware on an election official’s computer.
The elections board is cooperating with an ongoing FBI investigation. A data breach detected in July stole voter registration records for 200,000 people, said Ken Menzel, the general counsel of the state’s board of elections. However, the Kremlin has denied the allegations.
The alert came after the authorities made a decision to temporarily shut down the voter registration systems. Using widely known security tools, unknown hackers managed to exfiltrate the details of 200,000 voters in IL.
“It appears that approximately one-half of one percent of the records in the database were viewed, and many of those only contained information that is otherwise publicly available from other sources”, according to the board’s statement.
Meanwhile, the recently discovered hacks have state officials across the country scrambling to ensure that their systems have not been compromised.
Until now, countries such as Russian Federation and China have shown little interest in voting systems in the United States.
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.
And James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, has told Congress that manipulation or deletion of data is the next big cyber threat-“the next push on the envelope”. There are numerous safeguards created to protect against outright voter fraud, but altering data could be done well before the election. Once the voter’s status was confirmed, the ballot would be counted. “The signature caption and voting history were not accessed”, Menzel said. An official at the Department of Homeland Security cautioned this spring that online voting is not yet secure.
In Arizona hackers unsuccessfully tried to breach the voter registration system using malicious software, reports said.
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Experts say that the methods used are similar to those that were used previously by Russians. This certainly should be concerning to the common American voter.
