Russian Hackers Targeted Voting System Days Before The Election
It turns out the Russian hack targeted the U.S. voting system.
On Monday, the Intercept published a classified internal NSA document revealing that Russian military intelligence led a cyber operation to hack at least one US voting software supplier in the months before the election.
According to the bombshell report, Russian military intelligence successfully phished U.S.-based voting software vendors and posed as those vendors in phishing attacks on local U.S. governments.
The report is the most detailed U.S. government accounting of Russian interference in the election that has been published to date.
The report also details how the Russian intelligence operation sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials days before the election.
According to the NSA report, Russian intelligence sent the companies fake emails posing as Google, which prompted employees for their login credentials. By late October, Russian intelligence used the stolen credentials to pose as the voting software companies and send phishing emails to 122 email addresses associated with local U.S. governments.
If opened, the files in the second set of phishing emails could have opened a backdoor in government computers, “allowing virtually any cocktail of malware to be subsequently delivered automatically,” the Intercept reported.
The report suggests that the Russian attack on the U.S. election may have been significantly worse than originally thought.
The Top Secret NSA document leaves no doubt who is responsible for the election attack and was shared only with the “Five Eyes” nations – Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia.
From the NSA document:
Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.
According to the document, the investigation only began in the last few months. The document claims the investigation was spurred by “information that became available in April 2017.”
The news comes as former FBI Director James Comey is set to testify in front of Congress on Thursday.
About an hour after the Intercept published the story the Justice Department announced it has arrested the person who leaked the document.
You can read the full report by the Intercept here.
