A minor incident in 2016 in which Riverside, California, voters were turned away at the polls due to hackers changing their voter registration information during the primaries has lead cybersecurity professionals to uncover the underlying issue, that voting machines are still susceptible to cyberattacks. Further investigation concluded that it was likely that a vulnerability in the Riverside County voter registration lookup system allowed for Russian military hackers to breach the system.
Analysts at RiskIQ who initially discovered the vulnerability state that it likely still exists within Riverside’s system and elsewhere. The only way to verify this is to attempt a hack, however, cybersecurity professionals are not authorized to do so. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have reported that there is no known significant effort on behalf of Russian threat actors to target election infrastructure this year and that they are instead focusing their attention on disinformation campaigns.
Read More: U.S. patchwork of state, county election computer networks still vulnerable to cyberattacks
