There has been a lot of talk about foreign interference in the previous presidential election. A heavily redacted report has been released this week in which the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that election systems in all 50 states were targeted by hackers that were believed to have links to the Russian government.
It was first said back in 2017 that 39 states had been targeted while the Department of Homeland Security had officially confirmed that election systems in 21 states had been targeted. A joint report from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI released this April mentioned the possibility that the hackers may have tried to look for flaws in the election infrastructure of all 50 states.
A lot of questions still remain, though, because the report is so heavily redacted that it doesn’t reveal a lot of details. For example, it doesn’t make it clear how the Senate committee has reached this conclusion. It does point at some anonymous intelligence gathered in 2018 which was backed up by assumptions made earlier by the National National Security Council cyber coordinator Michael Daniel and the Department of Homeland Security.
“Russian cyber actors were in a position to delete or change voter data,” the report adds. However, the report doesn’t say if Russia did actually tamper with any of the voter data and there’s still no evidence that the hackers were able to access the actual voting machines.
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