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Friday, July 27th, 2018

A Swing-State Election Vendor Repeatedly Denied Being Hacked By Russians. The New Mueller Indictment Says Otherwise

Author:     Sam Biddle
Source:     The Intercept
Publication Date:     July 13 2018, 12:04 p.m.
 Link: A Swing-State Election Vendor Repeatedly Denied Being Hacked By Russians. The New Mueller Indictment Says Otherwise
Stephan:   It has always been my view that when it became obvious that a national enemy had affected the outcome of the election we should have canceled the 2016 election, fixed the vulnerabilities of our electoral system and held a second election with the same candidates. I don't think anyone who actually looks at the data can have any doubt that one way or another the Republican Party in league with the NRA, and the Russian government skewed the election. Isn't it interesting that Trump fired the staff person responsible for election cyber-security and has not replaced him, nor has the Republican-controlled Congress allocated the money such a protection effort would require, nor made it a priority. Here is the latest on this.

Credit: Alan Diaz/AP

Shortly before  the 2016 presidential election, Russian military hackers tried to trick employees of VR Systems, a Florida-based e-voting vendor, into downloading computer-hijacking malware, according to a top-secret NSA report published by The Intercept last year. As recently as last month, the company denied any breach had occurred. But, in fact, the hacking attempt worked, judging from an indictment of 12 Russian military officers prepared by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and handed down by a grand jury today.

Although the indictment doesn’t mention VR by name, referring to the polling and registration software maker as “U.S. Vendor” or “Vendor 1,” the facts laid out in the indictment line up with what was previously know about the 2016 spear-phishing campaign against the company. The indictment alleges that “in or around August 2016, [Russian military officer] KOVALEV and his co-conspirators hacked into the computers of a U.S. vendor (“Vendor 1″) that supplied software used to verify voter registration information for the 2016 U.S. elections.”

Compare that to a section describing VR Systems from the NSA […]

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