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Is The FBI Preparing Us For Election Fraud Come November? Russia Could Hack State Election Systems, FBI Claims

By Tara West
Published on: 07:51 PST, Aug 30, 2016

Could the FBI be preparing American voters for the possibility of voter fraud come November? As if this year’s election cycle couldn’t get more complicated, the FBI recently revealed that hackers had compromised the election systems in multiple states. The allegations go even further to once again implicate Russia as officials noted the hack was likely performed by a foreign entity.

When hackers released numerous emails from the Democratic National Committee, it caused a firestorm among Bernie Sander’s voters, who learned that their party might have shown favoritism to Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. In fact, the emails painted the DNC not as an impartial entity, but as a full supporter of the Clinton campaign. The DNC attempted on numerous occasions to discredit Clinton’s opponent, Bernie Sanders.

Following the revelations, as the Inquisitr previously reported, DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz stepped down from her position. However, her career in the Democratic party was far from over. Schultz was quickly picked up by the Clinton campaign as an honorary chair of the 50-state program.

Instead of discussing the content of the emails, the DNC and the Clinton campaign quickly blamed Russia for the hack. Reuters reports that Clinton quickly called out Russia for the hack and even went so far as to draw a line between the Russians and Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump.

“We know that Russian intelligence services hacked into the DNC and we know that they arranged for a lot of those emails to be released and we know that Donald Trump has shown a very troubling willingness to back up Putin, to support Putin. For Trump to both encourage that and to praise Putin despite what appears to be a deliberate effort to try to affect the election I think raises national security issues. But I think laying out the facts raises serious issues about Russian interference in our elections, in our democracy.”

While Clinton didn’t come out and directly accuse Trump of the hack, she did seemingly draw the conclusion that the presidential hopeful may have had something to do with it. She noted that Russia’s “interference in our elections” was a direct attack on democracy. However, she didn’t address the fact that the hack revealed the DNC might have had their hand in shaping the Democratic voter’s opinion of Sanders, something that many Sanders supporters feel actually was a direct attack on democracy.

Therefore, it is interesting that the FBI and local voting boards are now, once again, blaming Russia as the likely culprit in hacking state election systems. According to CSO, the FBI released a memo referencing the incidents in Illinois and Arizona, while indicating that common scanning tools were used in the hack.

“In late June 2016, an unknown actor scanned a state’s Board of Election website for vulnerabilities using Acunetix, and after identifying a Structured Query Language (SQL) injection (SQLi) vulnerability, used SQLmap to target the state website. The majority of the data exfiltration occurred in mid-July. There were 7 suspicious IPs and penetration testing tools Acunetix, SQLMap, and DirBuster used by the actor, detailed in the indicators section below.”

The FBI warned that the state board systems might not be secure, and election fraud might be a concern for the upcoming elections.

In the full memo, McLean County Clerk Kathy Michael revealed that the hack was being blamed on foreign entities. Her full, archived Facebook post can be viewed here.

“The offenders were able to inject SQL database queries into the IVRS database in order to access information. This was a highly sophisticated attack most likely from a foreign (international) entity.”

With the claims of foreign entities accessing United States election systems, American voters are preparing for election fraud in the coming election.

Fox News Insider notes that whether the hackers actually do anything with the information is irrelevant as it is creating a “crisis of confidence.” It is noted that the FBI is probing the hacks and with the memo released to the public, voters are becoming uneasy about the integrity of the election process.

In fact, Stewart Baker, a former top official at the Department of Homeland Security and the National Security Agency tells NBC that hackers don’t need to change the election outcome to have an impact on the legitimacy of the election itself.

“You don’t actually have to change the outcome. Leading people to believe that one side or the other has engaged in unlawful meddling tactics that undermine the legitimacy of the election outcome may be a better outcome than actually meddling in the system yourself.”

As a cybersecurity expert, Richard Clarke revealed in a post on ABC News that even a small amount of data manipulation by hackers could swing an election.

“In 2000 and 2004, there were only a handful of battleground states that determined which presidential candidate had enough Electoral College votes to win. A slight alteration of the vote in some swing precincts in swing states might not raise suspicion. Smart malware can be programmed to switch only a small percentage of votes from what the voters intended. That may be all that is needed, and that malware can also be programmed to erase itself after it does its job, so there might be no trace it ever happened.”

Clarke notes that the voting systems in America have long been accessible to hackers, but he says they have no proof that data manipulation had been used in the past. CSO notes that although any potential hacking is a concern, voter data is readily available online and pointed out that voter hacking is nothing new. In fact, it was noted that had the hacking occurred in any other election cycle it would have likely been unnoticed by the media. CSO says the hack is being used to “push an agenda” and that it is mostly “fluff and hype.”

“As for the attribution, that’s mostly fluff and hype, often used to push an agenda. Those working in the trenches rarely care about the Who, they’re more interested in What and How, so they can fix things and get the business back to operational status.”

With Hillary Clinton pushing her concerns of a “rigged election” as an effort by Russia and implicating Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in the process, could the media be using the “Russia” narrative to “push an agenda” as CSO believes?

Will the Clinton campaign use the new Russia hacking narrative to claim voter fraud in the November election should Donald Trump pull out a victory? Will Trump do the same to Clinton should he lose the election? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

[Photo by Jamie-Andrea Yanak/ AP Images]

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