(Florida) Panhandle county that backed Trump among Russian hacking victims

[steve2470]

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2019/05/16/panhandle-county-that-backed-trump-among-russian-hacking-victims-1021302

TALLAHASSEE — Russian hackers breached a county elections department in the Florida Panhandle where voters turned out heavily for President Donald Trump in 2018, according to a report confirmed by POLITICO.

Washington County was one of two counties successfully hacked by Russians seeking voter information files. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in the past week have briefed Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida’s congressional delegation about the attack, but federal authorities have asked that the names of the two counties be kept confidential.

The Washington Post reported that Russians were able to access Washington County voter information files. A person in Florida familiar with the investigation confirmed that Washington County was targeted after the attack had been revealed by officials in Washington, D.C. Two people in Florida said they suspect the second hacked elections office was in a mid-sized county on the East Coast of the state.

While it was known that Russians targeted Florida ahead of the 2016 election, the first confirmation that the effort was successful came in March, when special counsel Robert Mueller issued a report on Russian interference. The news jolted Florida officials, who had insisted that the effort three years ago was unsuccessful.

[UncleTomsEvilBrother]

1. Please...

...I wouldn't be surprised if Washington County gave the Russians the passwords to the voting machine software.

[dameatball]

2. Yep. Very conservative area to begin with.

[Rene]

3. If Russians knew the url of the vote counting server.....they hacked/'switched' servers

and ran rogue program code to flip votes. I support scheduling/software environments for many servers at a bank....Any application we built...had a primary and a secondary(backup) server environment in the design. 'Switching' between the two servers was easily done via very small script. Usually same scripts/pgms were maintained on both servers.....but I believe the vote counting script in the alternate server situation was rogue code and 'flipped' votes.

[mitch96]

4. I heard Leon county was the other... true? nt

[csziggy]

6. I doubt that Leon was hacked

Ion Sancho, the previous Supervisor of Elections, had worked with activists testing if the scanning software was vulnerable. When he found out how easily it was hacked he tried to buy new machines, but was blocked by the election machine manufacturers. He was always VERY aware of how vulnerable election systems were and I suspect that his successor, who had been trained by Mr. Sancho, is just as aware.

The quote in the OP includes this: "Two people in Florida said they suspect the second hacked elections office was in a mid-sized county on the East Coast of the state."

My personal opinion - based on no evidence or inside knowledge - is that it could have been Volusia or Broward Counties.

[mitch96]

7. " is that it could have been Volusia or Broward Counties."

Broward is a very democratic county. I would suspect the reds would like to know how to change the vote there.
I'm curious how The Sup of Ele in Leon county could stop interference from hacking without changing machines??? Some sort of add on to the machine?
m

[csziggy]

8. He improved the security for the entire system

Reduced access to the scanning machines to trained, authorized personnel. Made sure the servers were secured and monitored. Standard stuff for any facility that could be under attack.

I know she is not popular here, but the incident where the machines were proven not particularly secure involved Bev Harris and was documented in a movie called Hacking Democracy:

Hacking Democracy is the 2006 Emmy nominated documentary film broadcast on HBO and created by producer Robert Carrillo Cohen and producer / directors Russell Michaels and Simon Ardizzone and executive producers Sarah Teale, Sian Edwards & Earl Katz. Filmed over three years it documents American citizens investigating anomalies and irregularities with 'e-voting' (electronic voting) systems that occurred during the 2000 and 2004 elections in the United States, especially in Volusia County, Florida. The film investigates the flawed integrity of electronic voting machines, particularly those made by Diebold Election Systems, exposing previously unknown backdoors in the Diebold trade secret computer software. The film culminates dramatically in the on-camera hacking of the in-use / working Diebold election system in Leon County, Florida - the same computer voting system which has been used in actual American elections across thirty-three states, and which still counts tens of millions of America's votes today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacking_Democracy

[csziggy]

5. Washington County Florida is tiny

Population less than 25,000. It is very red, still a dry county (no booze sold there).

"The racial makeup of the county was 81.72% White, 13.69% Black or African American, 1.54% Native American, 0.36% Asian, 0.06% Pacific Islander, 0.58% from other races, and 2.05% from two or more races. 2.30% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_County,_Florida#Demographics