The National Association of Secretaries of State wants federal officials to help resolve concerns that a Department of Homeland Security computer made questionable visits to a number of state computers in recent months. The organization, based in Washington, “wants to make sure that we help the states in question get a quick resolution of this matter from the Department of Homeland Security and that there is a way to resolve it to everyone’s satisfaction,” Kay Stimson, spokeswoman for the association, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday. The organization surveyed its members after Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s staff traced what it considered a cyber threat against its network to a DHS-owned computer. The agency has denied any attempt to penetrate Georgia’s protected systems. Two states — Kentucky and West Virginia — discovered visits to their systems by the same computer involved in the Georgia incidents. Both of those states, however, said the visits did not appear to be malicious.
Kentucky and West Virginia were among the 48 states that agreed to allow DHS to perform security checks of their election systems in August. Georgia, at Kemp’s direction, was one of two that refused. The DHS computer involved in the current dust up was not part of the agency’s scans of state systems
Kemp said his office’s outside cybersecurity vendor alerted him that the computer in question tried unsuccessfully on Nov. 15 to defeat the office’s protective firewalls.
Bradford Queen, spokesman for Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Grimes, said the National Association of Secretaries of State, at Kemp’s request, asked if other states had experienced similar attempts to access their systems.
Full Article: Two more states say same DHS computer accessed their websites.