California: Inside Contra Costa County’s election cybersecurity scare | San Jose Mercury News
The email that showed up in an employee’s inbox at the Contra Costa County elections office last month appeared harmless enough: It looked like it had been sent by a member of her church group and contained the innocuously named attachment “Request3.doc.” But when the employee clicked on the attachment on a work computer, malware laced into the document attempted to contact a Russian IP address, sparking a weeklong scare over the possibility of a foreign attempt to access county election internet systems. Emails from the elections office obtained by the Bay Area News Group through a public records request shed new light on the incident, which occurred the same week that Special Counsel Robert Mueller delivered his report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. The suspicious email was investigated by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and state and federal authorities ultimately concluded that no county data had been compromised. State and local officials said they believe the elections office was not specifically targeted for the attack and it may have been a typical cyber scam motivated by money.