Russians Didn’t Hack Pasco County Elections: Supervisor

LAND O’ LAKES, FL — The Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Office was one of three across the Sunshine State to receive malicious emails in the days prior to the 2016 presidential election. A classified document allegedly leaked by a government contractor says those emails were part of a possible cyberattack perpetrated by the Russians to disrupt the national election.

While the hack attempt apparently occurred, Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley says his office was too smart to take the bait. Furthermore, the phishing email targeted voter registration data and would not have “impacted the tabulation of votes” had it been successful.

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The phishing email came into the Pasco supervisor’s office on Oct. 31, 2016, as early voting was well underway, Corley said. It was easily spotted as a scam, Corley told Patch, for several reasons. Firstly, it was designed to appear as if it had been sent by VR Systems, a Florida-based firm that sells election software to most counties across the state. The address the email originated from, however, ended with “@gmail.com,” not the company’s standard address.

Also suspicious was the fact the email contained an executable file and claimed to offer a software update. The timing, Corley said, was just all wrong. System updates are not issued once elections have commenced, he added.

Notably, Corley said, the email targeted voter registration data, not poll numbers.

“The irony is the information they were trying to get is available publicly,” Corley said. Florida makes voter registration data for all 12 million or so of its registered voters available. The exceptions are protected citizens, such as prosecutors and law enforcement officers.

Had the hack been intended to target voter tabulations, Corley said it wouldn’t have worked in Pasco.

“You can’t hack a paper ballot,” he said.

Other supervisors across the state who received the phishing emails were in Citrus and Clay counties. Corley said his colleagues also thwarted the attempt.

The bottom line, Corley said, is that there appears to have been an attempt, but it didn’t work. “This election, it was a well-run election.”

Online Security A Top Concern For Supervisor’s Office

Pasco County has several safeguards in place to ferret out such phishing emails and other fraud-related concerns. Aside from software that identifies potentially malicious files, such as the one attached to the Oct. 31 email, Corley’s employees are also well trained to spot scam emails, to quarantine them and contact the agency’s IT director, he said.

Phishing emails are often sent to the elections office, but Corley said his team doesn’t bite.

“There’s a whole bunch of people in Nigeria who want to give me millions of dollars,” he joked. As for opening those emails, he said, “You don’t do it. Our IT director has trained the entire staff: You see something suspicious, you tell the IT director.”

Corley's office also has an employee dedicated to looking for anomalies in voter registrations. The "National Voting Rights detective," as Corley described the role, conducts daily audits to spot anything amiss. If, for example, 5,000 convicted felons in Pasco suddenly had their voting rights restored, Corley said that would be a red flag.

Pasco Part Of The National Story

News of the potential hack in Pasco came to light when The Intercept, an online news outlet, claimed to have obtained a classified National Security Agency document. The release of that document, which claims Russian government hackers may have directly targeted elections officials, resulted in the arrest of Reality Leigh Winner, 25, of Augusta, Georgia. A criminal complaint was filed in the Southern District of Georgia on Monday, June 6.

See also: Georgia Worker Leaked Classified Info To News Outlet: Authorities

“Releasing classified material without authorization threatens our nation’s security and undermines public faith in government. People who are trusted with classified information and pledge to protect it must be held accountable when they violate that obligation,” said Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein in a news release.

According to the allegations in the criminal complaint, Winner worked for Pluribus International Corporation assigned to a U.S. government agency facility in Georgia. She was employed at the facility since on or about Feb. 13 and held a top-secret clearance during that time. On or about May 9, Winner allegedly printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information from an intelligence community agency, authorities claim. A few days later, Winner mailed the intelligence reporting to an online news outlet, which court documents do not name.

As the FBI searched her residence, Winner reportedly agreed to talk with agents and admitted identifying and printing the classified intelligence reporting at issue despite not having a "need to know." Officials say Winner also admitted taking the classified intelligence reporting from her office and mailing it to the news outlet.

The Intercept reporters caution that a single report is not definitive evidence, but they write that if true, the report reveals a much deeper level of attack on the American electoral process than has been publicly known.

Previously, the American intelligence community has reported on extensive efforts by the Russian government to covertly influence popular sentiment during the 2016 election against Hillary Clinton and in favor of Donald Trump, most notably by releasing hacked emails from the Democratic National Convention and Clinton Campaign Chair John Podesta. Multiple investigative bodies are currently examining these efforts, including possible collusion with the Trump campaign. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently denied that any such intelligence operations took place.

In the discussion of Russia's meddling in the election, Republicans have been at pains to emphasize that no evidence shows that vote tallies were altered. The NSA did not immediately respond for a comment on this story.

Read the full report at The Intercept.

Patch’s Deb Belt contributed to this story

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