Timeline: Foreign Efforts To Hack State Election Systems And How Officials Responded
In the thick of the presidential race last summer — Donald Trump was attacking Hillary Clinton over Benghazi; Clinton was widening her lead in the polls — FBI agents uncovered something odd.
On June 28, federal cyber experts noticed that the network credentials of an Arizona county elections worker had been posted on a site frequented by suspected Russian hackers. The password and username discovered by the FBI could let someone access the state's voter registration system.
Two weeks later, Illinois' state Board of Elections IT staff noticed a startling spike in activity involving their voter registration system. Malicious queries were hitting it 5 times per second, 24 hours a day, looking for a way to break in.
The Illinois state officials took their website offline. They discovered to their surprise that the attack had begun three weeks earlier and originated from somewhere overseas.
