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449808-generic-security-hacking

Nosotros already knew that Russian hackers had struck at the United States' ballot in an unprecedented fashion in 2022, but a new report suggests there were far more than attacks beyond the United states of america than were previously known. Hackers didn't merely assault the Democratic and Republican parties. They directly targeted election officials with spear phishing campaigns, gained access to voter registration databases, and at least ane campaign finance database.

That'south the report from Bloomberg, which spoke to "three people with direct knowledge of the U.S. investigation into the thing." One of these sources claimed that 39 states were struck in total, though we don't know which states (or which areas of the states). That's an important point to make, because elections in the US are fairly atomized and handled at the county and state level. There are federal regulations on certain aspects of elections, of class, but which voting systems and validation methods are used vary from state to land, as shown below:

Voting

Data by Ballotpedia. DRE stands for Straight Recording Electronic (eastward-voting).

Most of the state and canton governments in the United states are currently controlled by the GOP and the technology and processes used for vote verification differ from country to state.

The Obama assistants was concerned plenty about these activities, co-ordinate to Bloomberg, that assistants officials contacted Moscow directly via a modernistic-24-hour interval "red telephone" and provided evidence of how the The states knew the Russians were responsible. Despite the nickname, the linkage between the 2 governments has never been a telephone line or colored ruby. In the old days, a Teletype machine was used. Today, the Moscow-Washington hotline is a secure computer link with messages sent via e-mail.

When James Comey testified on Capitol Hill last week, he stated that Russian attacks confronting US infrastructure were a critical business concern during the 2022 entrada. "It's not a Republican thing or Democratic affair. Information technology actually is an American thing," the onetime FBI director testified. "They're going to come for whatever party they cull to effort and piece of work on behalf of. And they're non devoted to either, in my experience. They're just nearly their ain advantage. And they volition be dorsum."

"Concluding year, as nosotros detected intrusions into websites managed by election officials around the country, the administration worked relentlessly to protect our ballot infrastructure," Eric Schultz, a spokesman for former President Barack Obama, told Bloomberg. "Given that our election systems are then decentralized, that endeavour meant working with Democratic and Republican ballot administrators from all across the state to bolster their cyber defenses."

No evidence of actual vote tampering… this time

There's no evidence the Russians were able to tamper with actual vote totals, implying that either the Obama administration's directly warning worked, or that the Russians were unable to penetrate plenty of America's more than-than 7,000 voting districts to make a credible attempt to command them. The risks that they might practise and then are, nonetheless, very real. America's electronic voting organization is in shameful shape. Some of the states that utilize e-voting do not generate a simultaneous newspaper trail to compare with the tallied results in the event of a problem or demand to double-bank check the car. Many of our current east-voting systems were acquired in 2000, still run Windows XP (which hasn't received mainstream security patches in three years), and are horrifically secured. Back in 2022, Virginia was forced to replace more than iii,000 voting machines subsequently experts demonstrated that the machine'due south poorly secured Wi-Fi arrangement could be hacked and used to change every single vote, with no record that the change had taken place.

These bug aren't new — experts have been raising them since the Help America Vote Act passed in 2000 — merely they've never been addressed in a sustained or significant mode. The Obama Administration believed that the Russians were preparing to either tamper with voter registration, or to slow vote tallying in a bid to further undermine faith in the US election system.

That faith is central to the functioning of any democracy, and information technology's long by time that America'south voting infrastructure was field of study to a robust audit of its vulnerabilities, safeguards, and protections. Keeping the organization decentralized may make expert strategic sense. Merely certain security protocols, like a mandatory newspaper trail confirming the result of an electronic ballot, should be function of every voting organization.

The Bloomberg written report goes into more specific detail on how Illinois was specifically hacked and what the hackers attempted to achieve. The full article is worth a read.

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