Russian hackers tried to 'disrupt' presidential election in Dallas

[DonViejo]

Source: RawStory



TRAVIS GETTYS
15 JUN 2017 AT 13:24 ET

Russian hackers attempted to break into voter rolls in Dallas ahead of the presidential election but were unable to breach the computer system.

Elections officials in Dallas County, Texas, said hackers could have wreaked havoc on Election Day if they’d been able to manipulate or delete the database of 1.3 million registered voters, reported the Dallas News.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security alerted local elections offices in October to look out for around 600 suspicious Internet Protocol addresses possibly linked to Russian hackers, county officials said.

The county found 17 of those IP addresses had tried to gain access to its servers, officials said, and federal authorities confirmed that at least some of those suspicious users were linked to Russia.

Read more: http://www.rawstory.com/2017/06/russian-hackers-tried-to-disrupt-presidential-election-in-dallas/

[LonePirate]

1. You certainly have to wonder if the hackers were successful somewhere (besides Illinois).

As widespread as the hacking attempts were, it seems inevitable that they invaded and manipulated at least one system somewhere unbeknownst to the county or state in charge of the system.

[neohippie]

2. There is a report that says they hacked into 39 states

That's four out of five states in the country


https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-06-13/russian-breach-of-39-states-threatens-future-u-s-elections

[Maine-i-acs]

3. These cases coming out are only the ones we FOUND OUT ABOUT

How many others were UNDETECTED?

[wiggs]

4. we hear more every day. I imagine the stuff that becomes public is a fraction of the stuff that

the IC knows.

Wonder how much we will eventually hear about.

[Lonestarblue]

5. Rebublican counties not hacked.

It's interesting that Dallas County with more Democratic voters was hacked, but nearby Tarrant (Fort Worth) and Collin (Plano) Counties, both heavily Republican, were not. To me, this supports the claim that someone in the U.S. was working with the Russians to supply information about which counties to target and which were safe to ignore. That is fairly detailed information that would take awhile for foreign hackers to learn about unless they were given something like the database maintained by the RNC. I hope someone is analyzing not only which states were hacked but also the counties and whether voters in those counties are heavily Democratic or Republican.

[Igel]

6. You have no valid premise.

"It’s not clear whether Russian hackers tried to break into elections systems in other Texas counties."

We haven't been told there were attempts; we haven't been told there weren't attempts.

It's like saying, "The US didn't bomb Tokyo in WWII," and concluding that since it doesn't say we didn't bomb Kyoto or Spokane, we must have. Unless there's a really good reason to suppose the bombings did occur, silence is meaningless.

There's no really good reason to assume that Ft. Worth's system was the subject of hacking.

It's the same with what we know about what hackers did when the did gain access. Mostly, nothing. In one case they tried, it seems, but the way the report read leads me to infer it was a selective test, not a mass deletion. In the other cases, if they did anything it was mild. Otherwise there'd have been massive numbers of people using provisional ballots or complaining that they couldn't vote because of corrupt voter rolls. In this case, silence does indicate something: Given the sheer number of small complaints we heard on election day and running up to it, we can expect that if there'd been an incident involving many hundreds of voters that the local election board couldn't account for we would have heard.

Even then, it's not a conclusive argument.