The FBI is warning state officials to boost their election security in light of evidence that hackers targeted related data systems in IL and Arizona.
Advertisement
California elections officials are confident that the state’s voter data and election technology is secure enough to withstand cyber attacks such as those Russian hackers recently carried out against Arizona and IL.
News of the Arizona hack follows several other system breaches believed to be carried out by Russians.
North Dakota Secretary of State Al Jaeger says a computer system that handles ballot information in North Dakota is being checked in response to a warning from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Some experts, along with Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign, believe that Russian Federation was behind the embarrassing email hack of the Democratic National Committee right before its national convention last month. In both cases, the parts of the websites affected involved online voter registration.
Information potentially at risk from voter databases could be used for ID theft.
While Menzel attested that the elections board is highly confident the attackers didn’t do anything to the state database, he added that they are still analyzing the situation, as is law enforcement, he told SCMagazine.com.
The FBI alerted Arizona election officials in June of the cyber attack, describing the threat as “credible” and ranked it as “an eight on a scale of one to 10”, Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan, told the Washington Post on Monday.
Johnson said the agency was not aware of “specific or credible cyber security threats” to the election at the time.
The hack, which intelligence officials have pinned on Russian operatives, led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Illinois’ shutdown came after hackers reportedly accessed some voter records. IL has already admitted that it was hit by a SQL injection attack recently, and has taken down its database as a precaution. They did say they are investigating possible links with cyber-ops against the Democratic National Committee, which resulted in the release of thousands of internal party emails in July. “The FBI routinely puts out bulletin alerts and this one is no more cause for concern than any of the others”, Cris Thomas, security strategist at Tenable Network, told SCMagazine.com on Tuesday via email.
Advertisement
Before anyone gets caught up on who is responsible, Thomas, aka Space Rogue, a former white hat hacker and founding member of L0pht hacker collective, said we should remember that voter information is not private.
