On Monday, the Intercept printed a categorised inside NSA doc noting that Russian army intelligence mounted an operation to hack at the very least one US voting software program provider—which supplied software program associated to voter registration information—within the months previous to final yr’s presidential contest. It has beforehand been reported that Russia tried to hack into voter registration methods, however this NSA doc gives particulars of how one such operation occurred.
In keeping with the Intercept:
The highest-secret Nationwide Safety Company doc, which was supplied anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very just lately acquired by the company a couple of months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort in opposition to parts of the US election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated Could 5, 2017, is probably the most detailed US authorities account of Russian interference within the election that has but come to gentle.
Whereas the doc gives a uncommon window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it doesn’t present the underlying “uncooked” intelligence on which the evaluation is predicated. A US intelligence officer who declined to be recognized cautioned in opposition to drawing too massive a conclusion from the doc as a result of a single evaluation shouldn’t be essentially definitive.
The report signifies that Russian hacking could have penetrated additional into US voting methods than was beforehand understood. It states unequivocally in its abstract assertion that it was Russian army intelligence, particularly the Russian Basic Employees Principal Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that performed the cyber assaults described within the doc:
Russian Basic Employees Principal Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations in opposition to a named U.S. firm in August 2016, evidently to acquire data on elections-related software program and {hardware} options. … The actors doubtless used knowledge obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing marketing campaign concentrating on U.S. native authorities organizations.
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