On Monday, the Intercept printed a categorised inner NSA doc noting that Russian navy intelligence mounted an operation to hack at the least one US voting software program provider—which offered software program associated to voter registration recordsdata—within the months previous to final 12 months’s presidential contest. It has beforehand been reported that Russia tried to hack into voter registration techniques, however this NSA doc offers particulars of how one such operation occurred.
In line with the Intercept:
The highest-secret Nationwide Safety Company doc, which was offered anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence very lately acquired by the company a couple of months-long Russian intelligence cyber effort in opposition to components of the US election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated Might 5, 2017, is essentially the most detailed US authorities account of Russian interference within the election that has but come to mild.
Whereas the doc offers 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 relies. A US intelligence officer who declined to be recognized cautioned in opposition to drawing too huge a conclusion from the doc as a result of a single evaluation just isn’t essentially definitive.
The report signifies that Russian hacking might have penetrated additional into US voting techniques than was beforehand understood. It states unequivocally in its abstract assertion that it was Russian navy intelligence, particularly the Russian Common Workers Principal Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that performed the cyber assaults described within the doc:
Russian Common Workers Principal Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations in opposition to a named U.S. firm in August 2016, evidently to acquire info on elections-related software program and {hardware} options. … The actors probably used information obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing marketing campaign concentrating on U.S. native authorities organizations.
