Officials: Hackers Breach Election Systems in IL, AZ (CNN): according to a recent CNN report hackers successfully breached election system databases in Illinois and Arizona. CNN reports that hackers were able to access and compromise 200,000 personal voter records. However, the Board of Elections stated that they have a high level of confidence that none of the data was modified, according to the article. CNN reported that the breached database included names, addresses, sex, birthdays, and drivers’ license numbers on 15,000,000 individuals. The CNN article indicated that Arizona’s statewide voting registration system was taken offline after the FBI determined there was a credible cyber threat to the voter registration system. Apparently, the username and password of a county election official was posted and available online; however there appears to be no evidence of any data compromise or malware within the database, according to the CNN article. The CNN article goes on to say that election databases are particularly attractive targets for hackers since they contain personal information that can be combined with information gleaned from additional sources in order to engage in identify theft and financial crimes. The full text of the article can be found here.
FBI says Foreign Hackers Penetrated State Election Systems (Yahoo! News): In a related article, Michael Isikoff with Yahoo News reported that following the FBI’s investigation which revealed that foreign hackers had penetrated two unnamed [editor’s note: see above] state election databases, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson had a conference call with state elections officials and offered DHS’ expertise and assistance to help ensure that voting systems were secure. The article also indicates that the FBI Cyber Division issued an alert “Targeting Activity Against State Board of Election Systems.” The FBI bulletin identifies eight IP addresses from which attacks were sourced and further requests that states contact their Board of Elections to see if any similar activity has been detected, according to the article. The full text of the article is here.
Of Course Everyone’s Already Using the Leaked NSA Exploits (Wired): Lily Hay Newman writes in Wired that the National Security Agency (“NSA”) hacking tools that were leaked by the Shadow Brokers are allegedly already being utilized by people trying to exploit vulnerabilities. The Wired article also states that a number of the zero day exploits that were exposed have been patched or workarounds have been introduced, however those involve positive actions that must be undertaken and consequently until the patches are installed or workarounds undertaken these systems will remain vulnerable. The full text of the article is here.
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