Russian-based hackers may have been responsible for two recent attempts to breach U.S. voter registration databases in two states, raising fears Moscow is trying to undermine November’s presidential election, USA media said Monday.
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“The FBI is requesting that states contact their Board of Elections and determine if any similar activity to their logs, both inbound and outbound, has been detected”, the FBI memo stated.
The alert was first reported by Yahoo News and provided IP addresses associated to the breach attempts.
Russian hackers reportedly attempted to breach state voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois, US intelligence officials confirmed.
Although the hackers did not alter any data, the intrusion into the IL database marks the first successful compromise of a state election database, federal officials said. The amount accessed was “a fairly small percentage of the total”, said Ken Menzel, general counsel for the IL elections board. The latest hack is fuelling concerns that Russian Federation is attempting to interfere in the United States presidential elections.
According to The Arizona Republic, security concerns stemming from the hack prompted the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office to shut down parts of its website dealing with candidates running with public financing and voter registration.
Election officials say they’ve since implemented measures to reinforce the system. The department recognized one address since it “surfaced before in Russian criminal underground hacker forums”.
The FBI has told IL officials that it is looking at foreign government agencies and criminal hackers as potential culprits, Menzel said.
Voting systems have not been considered “critical infrastructure”, by the Department of Homeland Security, so they are not subject to federal government protections.
The FBI told Arizona officials that the threat was “credible” and “an eight on a scale of one to 10”.
“This is a wake-up call for other states to look at their systems”, Tom Hicks, the chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, told Yahoo.
Although the alert does not identify targeted states, Yahoo News quoted officials as saying they were IL and Arizona. In a worst-case scenario for voters, he said, hackers would change voter information – meaning residents would have to use a provisional ballot to cast their votes.
The FBI declined to comment on the breaches against the state election databases mentioned in its bulletin.
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In that call, Johnson said that while DHS isn’t aware of any particular cyber threat against election-related computers, it’s “critically important” to make sure that election systems are secure amid a rapidly changing threat landscape, according to a DHS summary of the call.
