South Carolina

When S.C. voters whittle down the list of who will become their next governor on June 12, election officials want to ensure their voting information is protected from attacks – including Russian hackers. State election officials are asking the Legislature to give their agency $250,000 in added money so they can make any needed changes to the state’s voter registration system and its network if voter information is compromised. “Security has always been important to us,” said spokesman Chris Whitmire of the S.C. Election Commission, which is asking for a total of $24.9 million in the state budget that starts July 1. “But, certainly, things changed in 2016 with the emerging threats that were out there.”

In 2016, Russian hackers tried to gain access to millions of the country’s voter registration records.

In South Carolina, election officials told lawmakers that on Election Day there were 150,000 attempts to gain access into the state’s voting system, which secures information on roughly 3.2 million registered voters.

Those attempts did not just come from hackers, Whitmire said. Some of the attempts could have been from bots, researchers and private companies looking to make money off the state by catching gaps in its voting system, elections officials have been told.

Full Article: SC continues work to safeguard your vote from cyber hackers | The State.

Amid intensified focus on election cybersecurity, South Carolina’s top government lawyers have advised the state’s election agency that it does not need to publicly release documents about how it is protecting voting systems. Citing a “significant increase” in open records requests about cybersecurity, State Election Commission Director Marci Andino requested an opinion from Attorney General Alan Wilson’s office about whether cybersecurity matters fall under an exception to the law that excludes information relating to “security plans and devices.” Assistant Attorney General Matthew Houck responded in an opinion that a court likely would find that the security plans exemption would apply to cybersecurity infrastructure, allowing the agency to withhold documents about the state’s protection systems.

State election officials say that despite millions of cyber attempts to gain access to South Carolina’s voter registration system in the past year, no one has succeeded. But two election watchdogs complain that problems have been discovered and they want to be shown evidence of their severity. … Initial assessments by the S.C. National Guard’s Military Department Defense Cyber Operations and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security done in the wake of the Russian hacking of the presidential election found weaknesses in all county offices and at the state elections agency. The elections agency later hired the Charleston-based cybersecurity firm Soteria to plug the holes. But a USC computer science professor and a Lowcountry elections watchdog want to see the full assessments for themselves. “Every single county has at least a critical or high vulnerability,” said University of South Carolina computer science professor and elections analyst Duncan Buell. “They were not doing the no-brainer things for election security.” The Homeland Security assessment found the same level of vulnerability in servers used by the state agency, he said.