intelligence community-were blocked before they could alter votes or have a direct effect on the results by manipulating voter records. Public confidence in the integrity of the 2016 election outcome rests largely on the belief that the Russian hackers-who did, in fact, attempt to meddle in the election, according to the U.S.
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“The American people have a right to know whether the Russian government’s hack of VR Systems played any role in the failure of VR Systems’ products in Durham, North Carolina, on Election Day in 2016,” Wyden told POLITICO.
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Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who believes the Russians may have successfully breached VR Systems, has been trying to resolve the unknowns. The uncertainty around what happened in Durham and to VR Systems has attracted concern in the U.S. 30: VR Systems experiences an election-reporting mishap during the state primary in Broward County, Fla., when preliminary vote totals get posted live before the election ends. 24: Russian hackers send phishing emails to VR Systems, based in Tallahassee, Florida.Īug. 18: The FBI issues a flash alert about suspicious web traffic from eight IP addresses. 15: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson tells state election officials in a phone call about cyber threats against election-related sites.Īug. Mid-July: Hackers steal data on 500,000 Illinois voters.Īug. June 14: The Washington Post breaks the DNC hack story. The FBI privately warns state election boards about potential attacks against voter-registration databases.
ANONYMOUS GMAIL HACKER 2016 REGISTRATION
June: The hackers release some of the emails and documents and begin targeting state boards of elections, breaching Illinois’ voter registration database. May: The DNC and DCCC learn about the attack and discover theft of thousands of emails. March-April: Russian hackers attack Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. We've put together a timeline to track what we know occurred and what is still unknown. Three years later, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about what occurred. Russian hackers targeted the Florida election company VR Systems as part of its campaign to disrupt the 2016 election, possibly opening a gateway to compromise voting on Election Day. VR Systems and the Russians: A timeline of what's known and still unknown about Moscow's 2016 election activity VR Systems spoke to POLITICO about the investigation but wouldn’t answer detailed questions about it or provide a copy of the forensic report that it says proves it wasn’t hacked. There are also questions about the thoroughness of that investigation. And VR Systems bases its assertion that it was not hacked on a forensic investigation of its computers that was done by a third-party security firm nearly a year after the Russian phishing campaign-plenty of time for any Russian hackers to have erased their tracks in the meantime. Indeed, there’s no indication the investigators looked for malware or even contemplated the possibility of foul play. North Carolina state election officials say Durham County’s investigation was incomplete and inconclusive, and they cannot say with certainty that the problems were due to human error. As for the Durham poll books, the county commissioned an investigation into the problems with its laptops and determined that the issues there were probably due to errors by poll workers and election staff.īut significant questions remain about what happened in Durham and just how close the Russians actually came to hacking the 2016 election. VR Systems has long insisted that none of its employees fell for the Russian phishing scam and that none of its systems were hacked. The Russians had also visited VR Systems’ website, presumably looking for vulnerabilities they could use to get into the company’s network, as the hackers had done with Illinois’ state voter registration system months earlier. The hackers had sent malicious emails both to VR Systems and to some of its election customers, attempting to trick the recipients into revealing usernames and passwords for their email accounts. And one important fact about the incident still worries election integrity activists three years later: VR Systems had been targeted by Russian hackers in a phishing campaign three months before the election.
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To this day, no one knows definitively what happened with Durham’s poll books. But the switch caused extensive delays at some precincts, leading an unknown number of frustrated voters to leave without casting ballots. State officials immediately ordered Durham County to abandon the laptops in favor of paper printouts of the voter list to check in voters.