FBI Warns States of Potential Hackers Targeting Election Systems
The Russians are coming?
The FBI has issued an alert across the nation that criminals and foreign governments might try to hack into election systems in November.
The department became concerned “after hackers successfully infiltrated one state board of election and targeted another” in Illinois and Arizona.
Yahoo News reported:
The bulletin does not identify the states in question, but sources familiar with the document say it refers to the targeting by suspected foreign hackers of voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois. In the Illinois case, officials were forced to shut down the state’s voter registration system for 10 days in late July, after the hackers managed to download personal data on up to 200,000 state voters, Ken Menzel, the general counsel of the Illinois Board of Elections, said in an interview. The Arizona attack was more limited, involving malicious software that was introduced into its voter registration system but no successful exfiltration of data, a state official said.
Now the FBI wants all states to start securing their systems now to avoid hacking during the presidential elections:
“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. “Attempts should not be made to touch or ping the IP addresses directly.”
An FBI spokeswoman wouldn’t comment on the specific alert. “In furtherance of public-private partnerships, the FBI routinely advises its partners of various cyberthreat indicators observed during the course of our investigations,” she said.
The FBI provided “eight separate IP addresses” and thinks they may have been linked since the hackers used one address in bothe attacks. The department recognized one address since it “surfaced before in Russian criminal underground hacker forums.” Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer for cybersecurity firm ThreatConnect, told Yahoo News that “the method of attack on one of the state election systems — including the types of tools used by the hackers to scan for vulnerabilities and exploit them — appears to resemble methods used in other suspected Russian state-sponsored cyberattacks, including one just this month on the World Anti-Doping Agency.”
However, the tools are not very sophisticated, but “very effective,” which is why “national governments or their proxies” use them.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson spoke with state election officials “about security standards and how to prevent cyberattacks from impacting the voting process.” They have also started a campaign that will “raise awareness about specific risks.”
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Comments
Preparing the post-election battle space for challenges in case of a Trump win?
actually they might be prepping to fix the election
I am highly skeptical of this. Sounds like to me the preamble to a federal take-over of state elections. The 10th amendment is circling the drain.
You are right on the money:
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/homeland-eyes-special-declaration-to-take-charge-of-elections/article/2600592
We are watching a bloodless coup in our country.
Too funny to watch the T-rumpian conspiracy nutters swing into action!
If some nerd can take control of your Jeep or drone, they can take control of a voting system. It’s been demonstrated.
I like Glenn Reynold’s solution…paper ballots. Hardly foolproof, but there’s a paper trail that can be reviewed.
Paper ballots and purple ink.
At least then the illegal immigrants can only vote once each.
What’s wrong with the old punch card ballots? Oh, thanks Al Gore. Maybe we should vote with paper ballots and pencils like Britain…
This is referring to a hack of the voter >registration< system, which contains a great amount of Personally Identifiable Information about voters.
The obvious solution to the possible corruption of this vital database is an immediate cross-check between states and municipalities, in order to locate defective registrations or multiple entries in the system. Of course, since this might/would lower the number of Dem votes in November, this will never happen…
Funny how often we hear democrats say fraud is a phantom, but this year is different….
Whatever. There is no low spot to which democrats won’t stoop.
Also, yes, we need paper ballots. Imperfect, but with flaws we understand and can see.
Of course they are worried! Just like with Blacks, the rigging of the voting booth is the domain of the Democratic Party. Don’t Touch!
The Arizona attack was more limited, involving malicious software that was introduced into its voter registration system but no successful exfiltration of data, a state official said.
Malicous software is generally intended to do something.
If it’s not there to read data, then maybe it’s there to write data.
And that means unlimited numbers of bogus registrations (of dead or entirely fictitious persons) can be added.
A town which checks the registered voter rolls against the town census would detect these …
… except that the census is just another database, and anybody who can hack into one can probably manage to hack into the other as well. I have yet to hear that anyone is checking their census databases for security.
Well. It’s a good thing that, as the D’rats keep reminding us, voter fraud is a negligible problem. That cheers me up no end.
When you consider Bozo Gates’ “socialism”/”global warming” rant —
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/11/02/bill-gates-socialism-can-save-us-climate-change/
— and consider Microsoft is heavily involved in voting technology, you trust electronic voting as much as you trust the FBI under Obama/Jarrett.
It’s probably soros spending some money to steal the elections. The leaks of his fronts in the U.S. are pretty damaging.
We could fix some of this using the same thing Democrat HQ in D.C. uses – a sign requiring I.D. to enter (the voting booth).
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/george-soros-criminal-justice-reform-227519#ixzz4Ioq14EFw
George Soros’ quiet overhaul of the U.S. justice system
While America’s political kingmakers inject their millions into high-profile presidential and congressional contests, Democratic mega-donor George Soros has directed his wealth into an under-the-radar 2016 campaign to advance one of the progressive movement’s core goals — reshaping the American justice system.
The billionaire financier has channeled more than $3 million into seven local district-attorney campaigns in six states over the past year — a sum that exceeds the total spent on the 2016 presidential campaign by all but a handful of rival super-donors.
“The prosecutor exercises the greatest discretion and power in the system. It is so important,” said Andrea Dew Steele, president of Emerge America, a candidate-training organization for Democratic women. “There’s been a confluence of events in the past couple years and all of the sudden, the progressive community is waking up to this.”
Soros has spent on district attorney campaigns in Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas through a network of state-level super PACs and a national “527” unlimited-money group, each named a variation on “Safety and Justice.” (Soros has also funded a federal super PAC with the same name.)
Rest at link
This could not happen without the complicity of the crying boehners.
Maybe we’re heading for a Yeltsin moment but I think that this country is too dissipated to arouse that much passion.
True. Not enough people are willing to fight for their freedom. Thus, they will loose it to fascist lunatics who will rule them.
Get serious folks. Paper ballots won’t do any good. When the totals are punched into computers they can be altered there.
So why does the IRS honor paper receipts to verify expenses on a tax return form ‘punched into a computer?’
Paper ballots are the last hope we have.
If you have two big stacks of paper ballots – are you going to count them by hand? Are you going to put your totals up on a chalk board along with the totals of other precincts and add them up together by hand? If you do this – in full view of the public – and you never put the intermediate totals on a computer – you won’t be hacked.
Paper ballots are nnot fool proof. A Dem precinct chair took her ballot boxes home to stuff them before taking them to the Astrodome to count. Swift sure and brutal punishment for voter fraud may help. DAs are reluctant to charge .
Funny, since the Dems are probably the hackers being the only way to win an election is to lie and cheat.
This smells like a false flag deal, and I’m not a conspiracy theorist at all. But suddenly “the Russians” are stealing our elections and the same political party that steals elections in Chicago, Philly, VA, PA, and New York want to be in charge of making sure that doesn’t happen nationwide?
I’m smelling a rat.