Two attempts to breach state voter records-one in IL, one in Arizona-have been traced back to Russian hackers, according to a report from The New York Times.
Advertisement
And in July, the Illinois Voter Registration System suffered a cyberintrusion in which hackers were able to retrieve a number of voter records, according to a message from the Illinois State Board of Elections.
Both Arizona and IL election systems were shut down for a week after the cyber attacks and both are back online with enhanced security features.
– IL elections officials are confident no voter data were compromised this summer when a hacker was able to see information on about 200,000 registered voters.
The incidents led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to send a “flash alert” earlier this month to election officials nationwide, asking them to be on the lookout for any similar cyber intrusions.
The FBI alert, first reported by Yahoo News, did not mention Russian Federation.
The FBI’s alert asks that states check with their election boards to report any similar activity.
Rich Barger, chief information officer at ThreatConnect, said that several of the IP addresses trace back to a website hosting service called King Servers that offers Russia-based technical support.
Some hope this will finally convince the Department of Homeland Security to designate state election systems as part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure”, which would mean they’d require federal protection.
Reuters obtained a copy of the document after Yahoo News first reported the story Monday.
Now both the state and local officials say the data accessed is not tied to vote counting software, so elections results can not be altered.
USA intelligence officials have previously said Russian intelligence agencies were behind hacks into the Democratic National Committee and related organizations.
“We see attacks literally every day, but it’s not necessarily against voter registration information”, he said.
USA officials said last month that they believed people working for the Russian government were behind the hack of internal emails at the DNC. The attack on Arizona, meanwhile, wasn’t as big, or as successful; even though malware was found in the system, no data was downloaded in that case.
Last week Senate minority leader Harry Reid asked the FBI to investigate evidence suggesting Russia may be trying to manipulate voting results in November, expressing concern about a “direct connection” between Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign and the Russian government. The state’s system isn’t linked to city or county government elections departments.
An FBI spokeswoman said on Monday that the bureau does not comment on specific alerts, but noted that it “routinely advises” on “various cyber threat indicators observed during the course of our investigations”.
Advertisement
“This data is provided in order to help systems administrators guard against the actions of persistent cyber criminals”, the statement read.
