14 DAY TRIAL // Experts have often warned that cyberattacks might seriously impact voting systems, and an incident which occurred in August last year demonstrates that they were right.
During the state and local races that took place in Miami-Dade County, cybercriminals attempted to manipulate the absentee voter registration platform.
The incident was brought to light by a grand jury report made after the elections.
The Miami Herald, which broke the story a few weeks ago, revealed that the attackers made over 2,500 requests for absentee ballots.
Fortunately, their attempts failed because the large number of requests raised red flags. Most of them came from a small number of computers apparently located in India, Ireland, the UK, and other overseas countries.
It’s believed that these machines were utilized as online anonymizers and since investigators couldn’t do much to trace down the attackers, the case was closed in January.
However, the Herald reported that some of the IP addresses used in the attacks were traced back to locations from the US. After bringing these IP addresses to the attention of the State Attorney’s office, the investigation has been reopened.
It’s uncertain what the hackers’ goal was, especially since they targeted both Democratic and Republican voters. In addition, the results couldn’t have been altered by the phantom ballots.
Experts told NBC News that this was the first documented attack against voting systems.
“In this case the attack was not as sophisticated as it could have been, and it was easy for elections officials to spot and turn back,” J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor at the University of Michigan and an expert on electronic voting security, told NBC News.
“An attack somewhat more sophisticated than the one in Florida, completely within the norm for computer fraud these days, would likely be able to circumvent the checks,” he added.