A Florida software company that nearly every county in the state uses to manage your vote was the target of attempted Russian cyber espionage.
VR Systems is a Tallahassee-based software company that helps track and manage voter information for nearly every supervisor of elections office in the state.
Just how involved are they?
The CEO describes it this way in an online promotional video:
"(We) Manage their voter registration rolls, manage their elections, print their paper registers, register voters, check in with people who sign their petitions, track their poll workers...It's just a one stop shop."
A one stop shop that's all digital and vulnerable to hackers.
As we learned in a report from The Intercept, a website publication, classified information was leaked to the site by a former federal contractor who's now in jail that revealed VR Systems was the target of Russian Hackers, who attempted to gain access to county election offices throughout the Tampa Bay Area.
Three days after that report surfaced, former FBI director James Comey testified:
Burr: Are you confident that no votes cast in the 2016 presidential election were altered?
Comey: I’m confident. By the time — when I left as director, I had seen no indication of that whatsoever.
But Cyber Security expert Tony Martinez with CyberSequr says hackers don't have to actually change votes to affect the election.
"One of the biggest risks aside from affecting the amounts of votes is crashing the systems and leading to a huge line in the polling place and potentially not allowing hundred of people to vote. It's absolutely a recurring threat and a threat that will affect the nation in all maters as a whole," he says.
The Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections says the Russian threat, while concerning, was never successful because the computers the hackers were trying to breach have no connection to the vote tabulation equipment.
We also reached out to VR Systems, but have not heard back from them yet.
