A top official at the Department of Homeland Security confirmed on Wednesday that Russia did indeed “successfully” hack voting rolls in a small number of states. NBC writes:
In an exclusive interview with NBC News, Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland Security, said she couldn’t talk about classified information publicly, but in 2016, “We saw a targeting of 21 states and an exceptionally small number of them were actually successfully penetrated.”
While breaches of voter rolls in at least two states—Arizona and Illinois—had been previously reported, this appears to be the first positive confirmation of Russian success by a top Homeland Security official.
Last September, DHS botched the public release of information about Russian hacking efforts in 21 states, originally contacting individual states on a Friday to give them limited information about hacker attempts to breach their systems. The Associated Press finally rolled the reports into one cohesive story. Several days later, Homeland Security officials told Wisconsin officials the information they previously relayed to the state hadn’t been totally accurate. That show of competency been about par for the course for DHS.
Wednesday’s Homeland Security revelation came just hours after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Russia was already eyeing the upcoming midterms and the U.S. was nowhere near prepared to deal with it.
“I don’t know that I would say we are better prepared, because the Russians will adapt as well,” Tillerson told Fox. […]
“There’s a lot of ways that the Russians can meddle in the elections, a lot of different tools they can use,” Tillerson said.
Tillerson told Fox that he suspects Russia’s exercise of its influence has already begun, and indicated that the US doesn’t really have a solid plan to block it.