FBI: Russians Hacked Two Voter Registration Databases
"There's serious concern..."
8.30.2016
16
The FBI has confirmed that Russian hackers have attempted to hack state voter registration databases. Illinois officials say the hack involves up to 200,000 of the state's voter records.
"This is the closest we've come to tying a recent hack to the Russian government," one official said about the hack.
The FBI says "there is serious concern" that the Kremlin is trying to interfere with with the US elections in November and foment distrust and uncertainty about the electoral process.
Two other officials said that U.S. intelligence agencies have not yet concluded that the Russian government is trying to do that, but they are worried about it.They said the Russians have long conducted cyber espionage on political targets. The question now is whether they are moving into a covert intelligence operation designed to destabilize the U.S. political process.The alert, first reported by Yahoo News, provided IP addresses associated with the hack attempts, though it did not mention Russia.One of the IP addresses was involved in both breaches, the FBI alert said.
"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 said.
The states targeted in the hacks are believed to be Arizona and Illinois. Both states temporarily took their voter databases offline after the attempted breach was detected.
Intelligence officials previously said that Russian hackers were behind the DNC email leaks that resulted in the head of the DNC resigning along with other high level employees. The voting system is not considered part of the US's "critical infrastructure" so is not under the control of federal government protections.
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