A U.S. Department of Homeland Security team found no evidence of intrusion on Maryland’s election system after the FBI told state officials that a company hosting certain elections systems had been acquired by a firm partly owned by a Russian oligarch. Still, the state’s elections board announced Thursday it will transition to a new data center “out of an abundance of caution.” The Hunt and Incident Response Team from the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center was deployed in August to offices in Annapolis, Maryland, at the request of state officials to examine the state’s election infrastructure network enclave, which is hosted and maintained by Annapolis, Maryland-based ByteGrid. “During the course of the on-site engagement, HIRT did not positively identify any threat actor activity on the MDSBE, ByteGrid, or Enclave networks,” concluded the 15-page report released at the elections board’s meeting Thursday.
The board said while the report’s findings were good, the state will transition to a new data center for its elections systems.
“We are taking this decisive action out of an abundance of caution and have started the process to transition to a new data center and have a contract with a cybersecurity and technology firm to help us transition to a new data center,” the board said in a statement on its website. “This plan will alleviate our concerns with the current ownership of our hosting vendor and demonstrates our commitment to having the most secure election systems possible.”
Full Article: Federal team finds no intrusion on Maryland election systems | The Tribune.