Although whatever intrusion inward the province voting organisation has non been reported, the FBI is currently investigating the cyberattacks on the official websites for voter registration organisation inward both Illinois in addition to Arizona, said Yahoo News.
The FBI's Cyber Division released a "Flash Alert" to election offices in addition to officials across the United States, quest them to picket out for whatever potential intrusions in addition to accept ameliorate safety precautions.
"In belatedly June 2016, an unknown instrumentalist scanned a state's Board of Election website for vulnerabilities using Acunetix, in addition to afterwards identifying a Structured Query Language (SQL) injection (SQLi) vulnerability, used SQLmap to target the province website," the FBI warning reads.
"The bulk of the information exfiltration occurred inward mid-July. There were vii suspicious IPs in addition to penetration testing tools Acunetix, SQLMap, in addition to DirBuster used yesteryear the actor."The SQL injection ready on on Illinois province board website took house inward belatedly July, which brought downwards the state’s voter registration for x days in addition to siphoned off information on equally many equally 200,000 registered voters.
However, the Arizona ready on was less significant, equally the hackers were non able to honour whatever potential loophole using a vulnerability scanning tool, which could stimulate got allowed them to pocket whatever information successfully.
In the wake of these attacks, the FBI also advised ‘Board of Elections’ of all States to investigate their server logs in addition to produce upward one's hear whether whatever like SQL injection, privilege escalation attempts, or directory enumeration activeness has occurred.
Last December, a misconfigured 300GB of the database also resulted inward the exposure of or in addition to thus 191 Million US Voter records, including their amount names, dwelling family addresses, unique voter IDs, appointment of births in addition to telephone numbers.
Why Blame Russia, Always? There's No Evidence Yet
The attacks against the province election boards came weeks afterwards the DNC hack that leaked embarrassing emails near the party, leading to the resignation of DNC (Democratic National Committee) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Some safety experts in addition to police enforcement agencies raised concerns near politically motivated hacking, pointing finger over the Russian state-sponsored hackers inward an endeavour to harm Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Although the FBI does non attribute the recent attacks to whatever detail hacking grouping or country, Yahoo News links the attacks to Russian Federation on the footing of IP addresses involved.
However, those IP addresses that the FBI said were associated amongst the attacks belong to a Russian VPN service, which does non conclude that the Russians are behind the attacks.
It's believed that the hacks were carried out to disturb the election procedure either yesteryear altering voting totals inward the database or yesteryear modifying the voter registration page.
Script-Kiddie Move Reveals Everything:
But, yesteryear scanning the website amongst a vulnerability scanner in addition to downloading the whole database, the ‘script-kiddies’ itself made a rod for their ain back, which indicates that neither they are sophisticated state-sponsored hackers, nor they had whatever intention to influence the election covertly.
Neither the Illinois nor Arizona board of elections stimulate got responded to these hack attempts.
