How Close Did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election?

On November 6, 2016, the Sunday before the presidential election that despatched Donald Trump to the White Home, a employee within the elections workplace in Durham County, North Carolina, encountered a drawback.

There seemed to be a problem with an important little bit of software that dealt with the county’s listing of eligible voters. To organize for Election Day, employees members needed to load the voter knowledge from a county pc onto 227 USB flash drives, which might then be inserted into laptops that precinct staff would use to verify in voters. The laptops would function electronic poll books, cross-checking each voter as he or she arrived at the polls.

The issue was, it was taking eight to 10 occasions longer than normal for the software to repeat the info to the flash drives, an unusually long time that was jeopardizing efforts to get ready for the election. When the problem endured into Monday, just someday before the election, the county employee contacted VR Methods, the Florida company that made the software used on the county’s pc and on the ballot guide laptops. Apparently unable to resolve the difficulty by telephone or e mail, considered one of the corporate’s staff accessed the county’s computer remotely to troubleshoot. It’s not clear whether or not the glitch received resolved—Durham County would not reply questions from POLITICO concerning the difficulty—but the laptops have been ready to use when voting began Tuesday morning.

Virtually immediately, although, quite a lot of them exhibited issues. Some crashed or froze. Others indicated that voters had already voted once they hadn’t. Others displayed an alert saying voters had to show ID before they might vote, despite the fact that a current courtroom case in North Carolina had made that unnecessary.

State officials instantly ordered Durham County to abandon the laptops in favor of paper printouts of the voter listing to verify in voters. But the change brought on in depth delays at some precincts, main an unknown number of annoyed voters to go away without casting ballots.

To today, nobody is aware of definitively what occurred with Durham’s poll books. And one necessary reality concerning the incident nonetheless worries election integrity activists three years later: VR Methods had been focused by Russian hackers in a phishing campaign three months earlier than the election. The hackers had sent malicious emails each to VR Methods and to a few of its election clients, trying to trick the recipients into revealing usernames and passwords for their e mail accounts. The Russians had additionally visited VR Techniques’ web site, presumably in search of vulnerabilities they might use to get into the company’s network, as the hackers had done with Illinois’ state voter registration system months earlier.

VR Techniques has lengthy insisted that none of its staff fell for the Russian phishing rip-off and that none of its methods have been hacked. As for the Durham poll books, the county commissioned an investigation into the problems with its laptops and determined that the problems there have been in all probability resulting from errors by ballot staff and election employees.

But vital questions stay about what occurred in Durham and simply how shut the Russians truly came to hacking the 2016 election. North Carolina state election officers say Durham County’s investigation was incomplete and inconclusive, they usually can't say with certainty that the problems have been because of human error. Indeed, there’s no indication the investigators appeared for malware or even contemplated the potential for foul play. And VR Techniques bases its assertion that it was not hacked on a forensic investigation of its computers that was accomplished by a third-party security agency almost a yr after the Russian phishing campaign—plenty of time for any Russian hackers to have erased their tracks within the meantime. There are additionally questions concerning the thoroughness of that investigation. VR Methods spoke to POLITICO concerning the investigation however wouldn’t reply detailed questions about it or provide a replica of the forensic report that it says proves it wasn’t hacked.

The uncertainty around what happened in Durham and to VR Methods has attracted concern within the U.S. Senate. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who believes the Russians may have successfully breached VR Techniques, has been making an attempt to resolve the unknowns. “The American individuals have a right to know whether or not the Russian government’s hack of VR Techniques played any position within the failure of VR Techniques’ products in Durham, North Carolina, on Election Day in 2016,” Wyden advised POLITICO.

Public confidence within the integrity of the 2016 election end result rests largely on the assumption that the Russian hackers—who did, in reality, try and meddle within the election, in accordance with the U.S. intelligence group—have been blocked before they might alter votes or have a direct effect on the outcomes by manipulating voter data. It has been publicly reported, for instance, that those hackers superficially probed election-related websites in 21 states and breached a few voter-registration databases, however didn't alter or delete voter data. And accounts of the Russian interference specified by a current Senate Intelligence Committee report and in Robert Mueller’s lengthy investigative summary launched earlier this yr assert that there’s no proof the Russian actors altered vote tallies and even attempted to do so.

But the government has also advised in one report and asserted outright in others—among them a 2017 National Security Agency document leaked to the press, a 2018 indictment of Russian intelligence officers, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report and Mueller report—that the hackers efficiently breached (or very probably breached) at the least one firm that makes software program for managing voter rolls, and installed malware on that company’s community. Moreover, an October 2016 e-mail obtained just lately by POLITICO, despatched by the top of the Nationwide Affiliation of Secretaries of State to its members round the country two weeks before the election, states that the Department of Homeland Security “confirmed” to NASS on the time that a “third-party vendor” in Florida that labored with native jurisdictions on their voter registration methods “experienced a breach.”

Not one of the public versions of the government reviews, nor the NASS e mail, determine the hacked firm by identify. But based mostly on particulars describing the affected firm in a few of the paperwork, they look like referencing VR Methods. VR Techniques itself has acknowledged that it seems to be the corporate mentioned within the government studies however says the FBI has by no means advised it that it was breached by the Russians, which the bureau can be expected to do as part of the victim notification course of if VR Methods had been hacked. (The FBI gained’t talk about VR Techniques, saying any interactions between it and the bureau are a part of an ongoing investigation into the Russian election interference efforts.)

However lack of notification isn’t proof that VR Methods wasn’t hacked. The federal government has been lax in sharing info in a well timed means with different targets of the Russian operation, and typically has been flawed or deceptive about what occurred. Georgia, for instance, discovered that two county websites in that state had been visited by the Russians solely when the 2018 indictment was revealed—two years after the fact. And in August 2018, when then-Senator Bill Nelson informed a Florida newspaper that the Russians had efficiently penetrated techniques in some Florida counties in 2016, the FBI and DHS publicly denied his declare, although he later was proved right.

Why does what occurred to a small Florida company and a few electronic ballot books in a single North Carolina county matter to the integrity of the national election? The story of Election Day in Durham—and what we still don’t find out about it—is a window into the complicated, and sometimes fragile, infrastructure that governs American voting. In some respects, elections are tightly regulated. An internet of federal and state laws prescribes how they're carried out. But these legal guidelines typically say little or no about how elections must be secured. The infrastructures round voting itself—from the voter registration databases and digital ballot books that serve as gatekeepers for determining who will get to forged a ballot to the back-end county methods that tally and communicate election outcomes—are offered by a patchwork of companies promoting proprietary techniques, lots of them small personal corporations like VR Methods. However there are not any federal legal guidelines, and generally no state laws both, requiring these corporations to be clear or publicly accountable about their security measures or to report once they've been breached. They’re not even required to conduct a forensic investigation once they've skilled anomalies that recommend they may need been breached or focused in an attack.

And yet a successful hack of any of those corporations—even a small firm—might have far-flung implications. In the case of VR Techniques, more than 14,000 of the corporate’s digital ballot books have been used within the 2016 elections—in Florida, Illinois, Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia and different states. The firm’s poll e-book software—generally known as EViD, brief for Electronic Voter Identification—was used in 23 of North Carolina’s 100 counties and in 64 of Florida’s 67 counties. The latter embrace Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county.

But VR Methods doesn’t simply make ballot e-book software. It additionally makes voter-registration software program, which, in addition to processing and managing new and present voter data, helps direct voters to their correct precinct and do other tasks. And it hosts web sites for counties to publish their election outcomes. VR Techniques software program is so instrumental to elections in some counties that a former Florida election official stated that 90 % of what his employees did on a every day foundation to handle voters and voter knowledge was accomplished by way of VR Methods software.

“You’re utilizing VR Techniques from the second you get to work till the second you get house,” Ion Sancho, former supervisor of elections in Florida’s Leon County, informed me. “New voter registrations, voter moves and handle transfers, identify updates … every little thing that you simply’re doing to that voter or might do, you’re doing by means of VR Methods.”

The company’s expansive reach into so many points of election administration and into so many states—and its use of remote access to realize entry into buyer computers for troubleshooting—raises quite a lot of troubling questions concerning the potential for injury if the Russians (or some other hackers) acquired into VR Methods’ community—both in 2016, or at another time. Might they, for instance, alter the company’s ballot ebook software to trigger the units to malfunction and create long delays at the polls? Or tamper with the voter data downloaded to ballot books to make it troublesome for voters to forged ballots—by erroneously indicating, for instance, that a voter had already forged a ballot, as voters in Durham experienced? Might they modify results posted to county web sites to cause the media to miscall election outcomes and create confusion? Cybersecurity specialists say sure. Within the case of the latter state of affairs, Russian hackers proved their capacity to do exactly this in Ukraine’s outcomes system in 2014.

An incident in Florida in 2016 exhibits what this type of Election Day confusion may appear to be within the U.S. In the course of the Florida state main in August 2016—simply six days after the Russians focused VR Techniques of their phishing operation—the results webpage VR Techniques hosted for Broward County, a Democratic stronghold, began displaying election results a half hour earlier than the polls closed, in violation of state regulation. This triggered a cascade of issues that prevented a number of different Florida counties from displaying their leads to a timely manner as soon as the election ended. VR Methods cited employee error for the problem, but election security specialists see a possible vulnerability in a reporting system that is centrally managed by a small, third-party company for a number of election districts. Mark Earley, the current elections supervisor for Leon County in Florida, acknowledged that if hackers have been to acquire log-in credentials for the VR Techniques administrators, or for county election officers, they might “probably do some injury” and change outcomes. No one is suggesting this is what occurred in Broward, however the danger existed.

“I feel it is a travesty that the citizens of Florida don’t have the knowledge necessary to know if our election techniques are protected,” stated Sancho. “We don’t have any knowledge to know what occurred in 2016, so we don’t know what is going to occur in 2020.”

Nobody has tried to tug together, in public view, all the obtainable details about what occurred with VR Methods during the 2016 election cycle till now. Based mostly on interviews with the company and with county and state election officers; analysis of government studies and paperwork obtained by way of public data requests; and a timeline of recognized occasions, the following represents as full a story as at present attainable concerning the occasions round VR Methods and the 2016 elections—and raises many questions not only about America’s capacity to secure the nationwide elections less than a yr away but the nation’s capacity to have belief in their integrity.

VR Methods is a small, employee-owned company, with a employees of about 50 individuals, based mostly in Tallahassee. The corporate was founded in 1992 by David and Jane Watson, British expats who obtained into the elections business when Leon County sought assist migrating its legacy voter registration database to a brand new system.

The corporate developed its first digital poll e-book software in 2005—what got here to be referred to as EViD—which may both be put in on units the company sells or on common laptops, as Durham finally selected to do. For a lot of the next decade, the company’s business was confined to Florida, whereas a separate firm in North Carolina referred to as Determination Help held the license to promote the EViD software program there and in different states. In October 2014, although, VR Techniques purchased Decision Support’s elections division and purchased its clients, signing its first contract with Durham in 2015.

With dozens of consumers across multiple states—clients who all expertise their peak enterprise hours at the similar time when federal elections occur each two years—VR Techniques can’t all the time provide customer help in individual. So it’s commonplace for the company to hook up with buyer techniques remotely for maintenance and troubleshooting—an answer that can also be less expensive for clients who are billed for journey prices when a VR methods worker needs to be on-site.

Remotely accessing a system is widespread for IT professionals in the personal business world to troubleshoot their firm’s own methods. However elections techniques, due to the premium positioned on vote integrity, are imagined to be treated with additional care. Authorities guidelines for voter registration systems don’t ban distant access, but do call for it to be carried out only by means of safe networks similar to a digital personal network or VPN. However VPNs only create an encrypted tunnel that forestalls an attacker from seeing or altering communication that passes between two methods; they don’t hold hackers out of techniques. If an attacker is inside VR Methods’ community or in any other case obtains the VPN credentials for a VR Techniques worker, he can probably remotely hook up with buyer methods just as if he have been a VR Techniques employee. When it involves Russian hacking, this menace is just not theoretical: It is precisely how Russian state hackers tunneled into Ukrainian electric distribution plants in 2015 to trigger an influence outage to more than 200,000 clients in the center of winter.

VR Methods doesn’t just have the power to realize remote entry to county techniques. Documents obtained by means of a public data request present that the corporate has also arrange an account for acquiring remote access right into a system in Florida’s Department of State, the division that manages the state’s voter-registration database containing some 13 million voter data. The distant entry does not appear to connect on to that database, nevertheless, however to a associated system used in the administration of the database. A log obtained from the state exhibits VR Techniques accessed the system remotely numerous occasions in 2018. Typically the connections lasted only a minute or two; typically they lasted extra than an hour. A hacker does not need a number of time to change a system—a minute is more than enough to push malicious code to that system. But an extended period provides a hacker time to explore and research that system so as to download or alter knowledge or discover and infect other methods that may be related to it.

At the time VR Techniques remotely accessed Durham’s pc in the run-up to the November 2016 elections, the corporate already knew that it and its clients have been within the sights of Russian hackers bent on influencing the presidential election.

Months earlier, on August 24, 2016, in the wake of already successful hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Illinois’ voter registration database, a set of emails hit seven VR Techniques worker addresses. The phishing emails got here from noreplyautomaticservice@gmail.com—a detail that means the attackers knew VR Techniques used Google for its company e-mail. Two of the focused addresses have been nonworking accounts.

The emails informed recipients that their Google e mail account storage was full and offered a hyperlink to obtain further storage. The link, nevertheless, went to a pretend Google webpage, the place the customers can be prompted to enter their e-mail account username and password. The attackers probably needed to take over the accounts to ship malicious emails to VR Methods’ election clients and make it look as in the event that they have been coming from reliable VR Techniques staff.

At the time the phishing campaign occurred, officers with the Division of Homeland Security and the FBI have been scrambling to determine the extent of Moscow’s hacking operations towards state boards of election and voter registration databases throughout the country, however have been still unaware that the Russian hackers had additionally turned their consideration to the personal firm in Florida.

The company’s account of the order of occasions after it acquired the phishing emails has various over time, making it troublesome to establish a transparent timeline of occasions. Earlier this spring, for example, VR Techniques assured North Carolina State Board of Elections officers, in a letter the corporate offered to me, that the emails have been caught by its automated e mail filters and quarantined as suspicious before any staff might open them. It implied that the corporate discovered these rogue emails immediately once they arrived in August and reported them to the FBI.

But in a letter the corporate sent this yr to Wyden responding to questions from him about how the corporate dealt with the phishing campaign, VR Techniques prompt a unique, extra complicated, timeline. On this account, the corporate stated its e-mail filters routinely halted and quarantined the phishing emails, and an employee subsequently reviewed the emails and determined they have been fraudulent. However it stated this occurred across the similar time that the firm participated in a convention call with the FBI and Florida election officers in “August” to debate safety risks to election methods. The decision, nevertheless, truly occurred on September 30, in response to the FBI. This means that the corporate both confused the dates, or that the employee who reviewed the emails didn’t truly uncover and evaluation them till the top of September, a month after the emails had arrived, and only after the FBI raised the alarm in the conference call.

In the course of the September name, the FBI urged members to look out for any visitors coming to their web sites from an inventory of suspicious IP addresses the FBI offered. After the decision, VR Techniques advised Wyden, the company appeared by means of its visitors logs, discovered activity from the IP addresses the FBI had talked about on the decision and subsequently reported that exercise to the bureau. It’s not clear, though, whether or not the corporate also advised the FBI at this time concerning the phishing emails it had acquired a month earlier, or whether or not it had already reported these emails again in August. (VR Techniques wouldn’t reply to questions concerning the timeline discrepancies.)

While small differences in these accounts might sound trivial, the small print supply a window into how vigilant VR Techniques was at the time the Russian hackers carried out their marketing campaign and whether the firm was able to know, with out conducting a forensic investigation on the time, if the phishing assault had succeeded. In a telephone name with North Carolina officials earlier this yr, VR Techniques stated that after it reported the phishing campaign to the FBI, the bureau “seemed” at its methods, nevertheless it’s not clear when this occurred or what it entailed.

In any case, the Russians weren’t completed with VR Techniques after the August campaign.

On October 31, the Russians created a pretend VR Methods gmail account—vrelections@gmail.com—and used it to ship malicious emails to greater than 100 clients of VR Methods in Florida. The emails came with a Microsoft Phrase attachment purporting to be a new consumer information for VR Techniques’ electronic poll ebook software, in line with the NSA document leaked to the media in 2017. VR Methods had in reality despatched a official e-mail to its North Carolina clients a month earlier saying a brand new consumer guide obtainable as a PDF or a Word document, according to a document I obtained. It’s not clear if the company sent the similar e-mail to its Florida clients. Nevertheless it suggests the hackers had an excellent understanding of the way to craft their malicious e-mail to match the nature and timing of official correspondence from the..

Src: How Close Did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election?
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