A leak of a National Security Agency document given to The Intercept confirmed a hack on one U.S. voting software supplier days before the November election. The Cyber Attack sent to over 100 local election officials spear-phishing emails, according to the report dated May 6, 2017.
Over the weekend, Russian President Vladimir Putin did not discount the possibility that some Russians may have meddled in the U.S. 2016 Election. But he denied it was sanctioned by the government. He said it may have been the work of a patriotic Russian.
Russian military intelligence
The report debunked Putin’s claim that Russian intelligence agencies are not involved in hacking. It attributed the cyber attack to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU. The GRU tried to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. After it got the data, the agency launched the spear-phishing campaign that revolved around voter registration.
There was no conclusion by the NSA if the meddling affected the result of the U.S. election. While the extent of what the hacking accomplished is unknown, the incident showed how vulnerable some elements of the voting system are to cyber attacks.
Florida company
According to the New York Daily News, the Russian hackers pretended to be from VR Systems, a Florida-based company.
Its EViD software is used for election management tasks such as checking if a voter is registered in eight states. These are California, Illinois, New York, Virginia, Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, and West Virginia.
VR Systems does not sell the machines used in voting. The phishing emails that pretended to have originated from VR Systems had malicious Microsoft Word documents that will give up control of a computer’s functions and persist through access to deliver more malware, according to NSA.
NSA contractor in hot water
However, the one who leaked the NSA document, a 25-year-old federal contractor, is in trouble for providing a copy of the report to The Intercept. The New York Post reported that the contractor was charged on Monday for leaking the top-secret NSA document.
Reality Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old contractor of NSA, appeared in court on Monday to face removing and mailing classified materials to a news outlet charges.
She was arrested over the weekend at her house in Augusta. Winner is a contractor at Pluribus International Corp.
Rod J. Rosenstein, deputy attorney general, said in a statement that Winner’s release of classified material without authorization threatens national security and undermines public faith in government. If people trusted with classified information and had pledged to protect it breach their obligation, they must be held accountable.
