The Mueller Report confirms the Russians tried to hack the Illinois Board of Elections website in 2016.
“In one instance in approximately June 2016, the GRU compromised the computer network of the Illinois State Board of Elections by exploiting a vulnerability in the SBOE’s website. The GRU then gained access to a database containing information on millions of registered Illinois voters and extracted data related to thousands of U.S. voters before the malicious activity was identified,” the report states.
This was part of an effort of the Russian intelligence agency — the GRU — to determine “vulnerabilities” on websites of more than two dozen states, including Illinois.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported on the hacking attempt in 2017.
The hack had nothing to do with counting votes in elections in Illinois. The hackers looked at voting registration data: name, address, date of birth, gender and the last four digits in the Social Security number. In all, hackers searched through about 80,000 records, with the elections board confirming the records of just under 3,000 voters were viewed by the hackers.
A report on the breach prepared by the Illinois State Board of Elections on Aug. 26, 2016, and obtained by the Sun-Times, details how the hackers were detected by state board information technology staffers.