I heard that Russia has blacked out the US election website.

Defencely

If hackers use the weaknesses of the public network to enter the websites of some US state governments, it is generally difficult for the hackers to pay attention to the network security department.

However, things are not necessarily present today. In the electoral season of the digital era, any signs of trouble may rise to political heights.

Recently, hackersâ€™ attacks on the websites of the two state election committees not only provoked the FBIâ€™s warning, they may even evolve into international conflicts.

Due to frequent hacking attacks, the FBI issued an alert to the State Election Commission this Monday asking them to guard against hacking. According to Yahoo News, the targets of hacking seem to be the election committees of Arizona and Illinois, which previously acknowledged the fact that they were attacked. Information security experts speculated that the attack was related to Russia. Russian hackers may have already attacked the election websites of the National Democratic Committee and Hillary Clinton.

Thomas Rid, an information security expert at the War Research Department of King's University in London and author of "The Emergence of the Machine," said:

"Some hackers are trying to enter the database, and it has been successful in bringing out data. This is very critical. The hackers' emergence is a big problem when various forces try to interfere in the election."

Confusing attack

In a warning to the State Election Commission, the FBI stated that at least one of the attacks used SOL Injection (SQL injection) technology.

This is a common network attack technique. In the entry field of the website, the â€œGet Data Inputâ€ instruction code is added to trigger the instruction of the site background, thereby providing the attacker with the entrance of the site server. In this attack, hackers may have stolen 20,000 voter records from the Illinois Electoral Commission and caused it to close its registration function for ten days.

Due to the widespread use of SQL Injection technology, it is difficult to prove whether this attack involves hackers supported by experienced countries, especially Russian government hackers. However, when the security company ThreatConnect probed the attack IP address provided by the FBI, it discovered some clues that could vaguely point to Russia.

The company found that one of the IP addresses visited Rubro.biz in 2015. This site is actually a Russian cybercrime black market (however, the American Connection Magazine found that the IP address now points to a site related to the Turkish AKP party. Of course. This clue may be merely to hide their eyes, because neither WIRED nor ThreatConnect can prove the legitimacy of this Turkish website). And the VPN that the attacker uses appears in King Servers, this is a server of Russian website.

Rich Barger, Head of Crieat Resolution at ThreatConnect, said: â€œWe have mastered the basic evidence that this attack is related to Russia.â€ But he also said that the companyâ€™s investigation is still in its infancy and the incident is still under investigation.

Who will bear the brunt of the impact?

Both the Illinois and Arizona election committees did not immediately comment on this matter. However, if this attack is indeed related to foreign hackers (currently only â€œifâ€), then the stolen 20,000 voter records show at least the problems of the US election system:

After all, for many years, the voter registration records in the United States have been public. They are often sold to data agents and they are handed over to political campaigners and marketing staff.

What's more, this will shake the people's minds: This attack for the first time caught the attention of the American public. They began to realize that foreign forces like Russia may influence or interfere with American politics.

The severity of the incident may be beyond imagination

In fact, â€œwe knew that this kind of thing would happenâ€. For many years, security experts have repeatedly warned that the US electoral system may be attacked by hackers. This attack is another reminder to it that the US election process is not yet ready to face hackers who are already eyeing.

Attacking the voter registration system, or forcing Illinois's registration system to hang for weeks, may not pose a real threat to the US election, but the attack actually creates a psychological threat. After all, the deleted ballot papers can be filled with temporary ballots. However, the use of cyber attacks by foreign governments has led to doubts about the results of the elections. This may greatly shake U.S. politics in the coming November.

Rid said: "What I am worried about is not the technical damage to the electoral system. This situation will not happen. What I worry about is that this approach will cause people to have doubts, questions and enlarge uncertainty. This kind of psychological Fragility is hard to make up for."

During the election season, Republican candidates were frequently accused of cheating. This psychological damage was more serious than any hacking attack.

Via wired