US officials late on Friday said that the Iranian hackers behind a wave of threatening e-mails sent to thousands of people in the US earlier this month successfully accessed voter data.
The statement, issued jointly by the FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), partially confirmed the authenticity of a video distributed as part of a disinformation campaign that briefly drew attention when it became public last week.
The campaign — which consisted of thousands of threatening e-mails sent to random US voters in the name of a pro-US President Donald Trump far-right group — featured a video in which a hacker purported to demonstrate how they could cause havoc by breaking into voter registration records.
Experts who examined the footage said that it amounted to little more than an attempt to scare voters about the integrity of Tuesday’s election, but the question of whether the hackers actually did break in anywhere had gone unanswered until now.
CISA and the FBI on Friday said that “the actor successfully obtained voter registration data in at least one state.”
The state was not identified, although purported personal details of Alaska voters were briefly flashed on the video.
The FBI, CISA, and the Alaska Division of Elections did not immediately comment on the matter.
The hackers also scanned a number of other states’ election sites for vulnerabilities, the CISA and FBI said.
Cyberscoop, which first reported on CISA and the FBI’s findings, said that 10 states were scanned altogether.
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