Monday, the Intercept released an internal classified NSA document noting that Russian military intelligence mounted an operation to hack at least one U.S. voting software provider — which provided software related to voter registration files — in the months leading up to the U.S. presidential contest last year It has been reported before that Russia tried to hack into voter registration systems, but this NSA document provides details of how such an operation took place.
According to the Intercept: :
The top-secret National Security Agency document, which was provided anonymously to The Intercept and independently authenticated, analyzes intelligence recently acquired by the agency about a months-long Russian cyber intelligence effort against elements of the US election and voting infrastructure. The report, dated May 5, 2017, is the US government’s most detailed account of Russian election interference yet to come to light.
While the document provides a rare window into the NSA’s understanding of the mechanics of Russian hacking, it does not show the underlying “raw” intelligence on which the analysis is based. A US intelligence official who declined to be identified cautioned against drawing too large a conclusion from the document because a single analysis is not necessarily definitive.
The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated more into US voting systems than previously understood. In his summary statement, he stated unequivocally that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General State Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that carried out the cyber attacks described in the document:
Actors of the Main Directorate of General Intelligence of the Russian General Staff … carried out cyber espionage operations against a named US company in August 2016, apparently to obtain information about software solutions and election-related hardware. … Actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration spear-phishing campaign targeting US local government organizations.
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