Florida Senator Marco Rubio has revealed in an interview that Russian hackers were “in a position” to alter voting records in a Florida county. They were able to breach one county’s voting systems during the Presidential Election back in 2016. Rubio said that not only were the hackers able to access the systems, they even had the ability to change voter roll data.
According to The New York Times, the hackers had imitated emails from a company which sells electronic voting equipment to states in the country. Some voting officials did feel that the emails weren’t right as British vocabulary and Gmail accounts were used. However, at least in one county, the hackers were able to break in.
Senator Rubio said that they were able to obtain access to a system and that the hackers were “in a position” to alter records. The Federal Bureau of Investigation hasn’t revealed as yet which Florida county this took place in, it hasn’t even told state officials, which are still clueless about the county affected.
Rubio’s confirmation echoes similar findings from a Senate Intelligence Committee report from last year which claimed that hackers aligned with the Russian state went after government and vendor systems before the elections and “scanned databases for vulnerabilities, attempted intrusions, and in a small number of cases successfully penetrated a voter registration database,” as part of a larger effort to influence the elections.
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