The Russian internet nodes used to hack into voting systems in Illinois and Arizona were also used in recent penetrations of Turkey’s ruling party, the Ukrainian Parliament and a political party in Germany, a U.S. cybersecurity firm said Friday. Individuals using Russian infrastructure “are looking to manipulate multiple countries’ democratic processes,” said an alert from ThreatConnect, an Arlington, Virginia, firm that tracks digital intrusions. The company said, however, that it still did not have enough information to attribute the attacks to any individual or country. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, told the Bloomberg news agency that a public leak of more than 19,000 emails siphoned from computers at the Democratic National Committee earlier in the summer was for the public good. He denied, however, that Russia had perpetrated the hack. “Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?’’ Putin told Bloomberg in Vladivostok, the Pacific port. “The important thing is the content that was given to the public.”
The DNC leak on the eve of the Democratic National Convention led to the resignation of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz as party chair.
The DNC leak and an FBI warning Aug. 18 that hackers had sought to penetrate state voting systems have heightened concerns that foreign cyberattacks are designed to sway the outcome of U.S. elections.
In its warning, the FBI did not name the states where it had detected cyber intrusions, but election officials in Illinois and Arizona acknowledged that their systems had been hacked.
Full Article: Cybersecurity firm finds evidence of Russian tie to hacks of vote systems in Arizona and Illinois | McClatchy DC.