Russian hackers targeted 21 U.S. states during election: U.S. official

[Zippyjuan]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-congress-idUSKBN19C1Y3


Russian hackers targeted 21 U.S. states' election systems in last year's presidential race, a Department of Homeland Security official told Congress on Wednesday.

Jeanette Manfra, the department's acting deputy undersecretary of cyber security, would not identify which states had been targeted, citing confidentiality agreements. She reiterated that there was no evidence that any actual votes were manipulated.

"As of right now, we have evidence that election-related systems in 21 states were targeted," Manfra told the Senate Intelligence Committee, which investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Systems were breached in a smaller number of states, she said, but did not give a specific figure.

Department officials had said about 20 states had been probed by hackers working on behalf of the Russian government, but recent news media reports had suggested the number could have been far higher.

Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate panel, expressed frustration at Manfra's refusal to identify which states had been targeted.

"I just fundamentally disagree," he said.

Warner on Tuesday sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly asking the agency to disclose more information about hacking attempts on state and local election systems.

Arizona and Illinois last year confirmed that hackers had targeted their voter registration systems.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the Kremlin orchestrated a wide-ranging influence operation that included email hacking and online propaganda in order to discredit Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, a Republican, win the White House.

Manfra and other officials testifying on Wednesday reiterated that U.S. elections are resilient to hacking in part because they are decentralized and largely operated on the state and local level.

[Swordsmyth]

More Lies.
We know the CIA can frame other people when they hack.

[Brian4Liberty]

How many systems were probed by hackers from China, Israel and Poland?

[Swordsmyth]

How many systems were probed by hackers from China, Israel and Poland?
Not to mention DHS.
When they got caught it became a "test".

[Zippyjuan]

https://www.wired.com/2016/12/obama-russia-hacking-sanctions-china/


The US strategy in China was in many ways the polar opposite of a knee-jerk, hack-back approach. It was a years-long series of diplomatic and legal efforts, all aimed at curbing Beijing's economic espionage. And according to security firms like FireEye and Crowdstrike, which have closely tracked state-sponsored intrusions and often served as remediation consultants called in after the hacks, those efforts worked. At the very least, they stemmed China's hundreds of attacks on American private sector targets, if not its more traditional espionage against US government agencies.

In a report FireEye released last June, researchers documented the decline in monthly attacks by 72 Chinese hacker groups from more than 60 attacks per month for most of 2013 to five or fewer attacks in most months of 2016. (Shown in the graph below.) The company even blamed the disappearing Chinese attacks for a serious drop in its own revenue and stock price. Many of its customers were no longer being victimized.

https://media.wired.com/photos/59268f1b7034dc5f91bebdc8/master/w_532,c_limit/Screen-Shot-2016-12-15-at-10.19.27-PM.png

Crowdstrike chief technology officer Dmitri Alperovitch says his company, which was the first to attribute the Democratic National Committee attacks to Russian government hackers, has seen a similar falloff in Chinese hacking incidents. Around 90 percent of the hundreds of China-sponsored attacks Crowdstrike monitored in earlier years disappeared 2016, he says. It's unlikely, too, that the attacks have only become more sophisticated, and harder to detect. Alperovitch says the same methods seen previously are still used against some high-value government targets. He calls those Chinese hacking statistics "the biggest accomplishment we’ve had in the cyber domain in the last 30 years."

That decline was achieved through two major moves by the US government since 2014. First, the US Department of Justice identified five Chinese men by name—all members of China's People's Liberation Army—and accused them of taking part in a series of intrusions of American companies, going so far as to issue criminal charges against them in absentia. Additionally, after the US threatened new trade sanctions against China for its hacking activities in 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Obama signed an agreement in that September in which both countries agreed not to hack the other's private sector targets. With a few exceptions, China has since abided by that agreement, Alperovitch says.

[shocker315]

Targeted by hackers vs impacted the election... are two separate things that are constantly conflated and twisted by the MSM. The first may be true, but does not automatically mean the latter is fact.


Former (Obama) DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson: No votes changed by Russians in 2016 election

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/former-dhs-secretary-jeh-johnson-no-votes-changed-by-russians-in-2016-election/article/2626624


"I know of no evidence that through cyber intrusion, votes were altered or suppressed in some way," Johnson told the House Intelligence Committee

Stated another way... the outcome of the election was not changed due to Russian hacks.

The "Russia hacked the vote to elect Trump" narrative is fake news.

[Dr.3D]

Hope we don't get a flood when all the snowflakes get done melting down.

[enhanced_deficit]

News like these make POTUS' SIL's secret channel links with Russians even more troubling than previously perceived.



Related

Russian ambassador told Moscow that Kushner wanted secret communications channel with Kremlin (http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?511014-Russian-ambassador-told-Moscow-that-Kushner-wanted-secret-communications-channel-with-Kremlin&)

[CPUd]

http://i.imgur.com/rKRR689.jpg

[Swordsmyth]

http://i.imgur.com/rKRR689.jpg

But for whom?