U.S. intel: Russia compromised seven states prior to 2016 election
I don't doubt our intel chiefs, but I have to say this makes no sense. Why would Russians try to hack Texas or California elections? Hillary won California by four million votes, so no amount of tampering was going to matter! In Texas, Russia's preferred outcome was already assured.
Nunez in California has proven useful.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't make any sense, you're right, but maybe some Russian government officials are as dumb as some of our government officials? It's possible.
ReplyDeleteI know some stuff about this subject, and while I don't know the details of the specific hacks Team Russia was able to implement, I can give you a broad explanation.
ReplyDeleteFirst, you don't go into the task of remotely compromising the security of a set of databases on another continent knowing which targets are going to yield positive results, and you don't know how cracking one database might give you the key to others. Alaska is listed as one of the systems that was compromised, and they don't specify if it was an attack on their websites or their voter registration systems, but let's assume it was the latter.
The current Alaska VREMS database was installed in 2015 by PCC Technology Group (https://pcctechnologyinc.com/client-list/), which also provides voter registration software to 14 other state governments. It's possible and even probable that code is reused by PCC in across all of these databases, and so breaking into Alaska's system might yield an exploit that gives you the key to Georgia or North Carolina.
Second, concurrent with Presidential election was the election of several governors, all of the House of Representatives and a third of the Senate, half of many State Senates and all of most states' lower houses. Someone interested in helping the GOP might be interested enough in swinging downticket races might find it prudent to attack California and Texas for that purpose, although maliciously deleting some Democratic voters registrations is a pretty low ROI attack, and I agree that this is unlikely to have been in the Russians interest.
Lastly, while Putin's primary objective seems to have been keeping Clinton out of the White House, his secondary objective was to sow chaos and discord by throwing doubt on the legitimacy of the election process.
That goal has succeeded very well.
The problem is that nobody can prove intent. Voter rolls would be a good target for identity theft. Hacking elecelec rolls in general is a pretty stupid target. What mayhem can be mmade that way? It's clear they were just spreading chaos by meddling any way they could.
ReplyDelete