Hacking An Election: Why It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You Might Think

By Pam Fessler | 1 August 2016

NPR — The recent hacking of Democratic Party databases — and strong suspicions that the Russian government is involved — have led to new fears that America’s voting systems are vulnerable to attack and that an outsider could try to disrupt the upcoming elections.

A cyberattack on U.S. elections isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. Just a week and a half ago, Illinois election officials shut down that state’s voter registration database after discovering it had been hacked. In June, Arizona took its voter registration system offline after the FBI warned it too might have been hacked, although no evidence of that was found.

In May, security analyst David Levin was arrested after he gained access to the Lee County, Fla., elections website. Levin said in a YouTube video he was only trying to show how vulnerable the system was: “Yeah, you could be in Siberia and still perform the attack that I performed on the local supervisor of election website. So this is very important.” The county says the problems were later fixed.

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