The FBI has found instances of hackers accessing two state election databases, according to “CBS News”.
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The incidents led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to send a “flash alert” to election officials earlier this month, asking them to watch for similar cyber-attacks.
In Illinois, elections officials said the cyberattack began June 23.
“It looks to be fewer than 200,000” names, Menzel said of the hack. But the state concluded that the system was not successfully breached.
After the IL cyberattack and another attempt in Arizona, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a “flash alert” this month to warn of malicious attempts to obtain access to states’ election voter registration information.
The bureau has told IL officials that they’re looking at possible foreign government agencies as well as criminal hackers, Menzel said. On Sunday, the ICIT released a report on vulnerabilities in the various voting systems now in use, issued under the alarming title “Hacking Voting Machines is Easy!” The intrusion led the state election board to shut down the voter registration system for a week.
For one, he said, if a voter’s name does not show up on the list, the individual can still cast a provision ballot and once his or her status is confirmed, the ballot will be counted.
“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 alert says. “As part of the ongoing effort, the secretary also announced that DHS is convening a Voting Infrastructure Cyber-security Action Campaign with experts from all levels of government and the private sector to raise awareness of cyber-security risks potentially affecting voting infrastructure and promote the security and resilience of the electoral process”, a spokesperson for DHS said as part of the announcement of the call.
“A person can’t be scared to vote, you [have to] get out there and vote and make sure that you use that right to vote”, Litwiler said. “We’re very confident nothing was added, deleted or altered”.
The elections board, however, warned that “due to the ambiguous nature of the attack, we may never know the exact number of affected voters”.
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Although the Department of Homeland Security was not aware of specific cyber threats against election-related networks, Johnson urged officials to secure their systems, according to a transcript of the call released by the department.
