Officials: Russian hackers targeted Arizona, Illinois election systems

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last updated 30 August 2016

A spokesman for Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan (R) said Monday that the FBI told state officials in June that Russians were behind a hack targeting the Arizona voter registration system.

The spokesman, Matt Roberts, told The Washington Post the FBI said the threat was "an 8 on a scale of 1 to 10." Reagan shut down the system for almost a week, and investigators determined that the hackers did not compromise any state or county systems, but did get the user name and password of an elections official in Gila County. Roberts said the FBI did not say if the hackers were part of the Russian government.

In July, Illinois officials also found that hackers were able to get into their election systems, The Post reports. No data was altered, but they were able to retrieve "a fairly small percentage of the total" of voter records, said Ken Menzel, general counsel for the Illinois elections board. After notifying the FBI, state officials closed the voter registration system down for a week. "I'm less concerned about the attackers getting access to and downloading the information," Brian Kalkin, vice president of operations for the Center for Internet Security, told The Post. "I'm more concerned about the information being altered, modified, or deleted. That's where the real potential is for any sort of meddling in the election."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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