On November 5th,2019, Ohio detected a cyber attack on its election procedure which is now concluded to be unsophisticated. Frank LaRose, the Republican Secretary of State released a press statement on Tuesday disclosing the details of the attack and confirmed that the attack originated in Panama and a Russian Company was behind the cyber incident.
Frank LaRose said that the hackers tried to induce an “SQL Injection based malicious code” into the official website which was eventually blocked and thwarted by the IT threat detection systems of the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office.
“It was just an attempt to exploit the vulnerabilities and the bad guys were in lookout for soft spots. However, the good guys won over the bad guys and everything went in favor of the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office”, LaRose said. He added that the attempt was to disrupt and undermine the credibility of elections. Furthermore, he cleared the air that neither the election machines or the ballot counters are connected to the internet during the election procedure.
Note 1- Ohio is being guarded by the “Albert” intrusion system, which is a digital threat detection framework meant to alert the authorities on any unauthorized intrusion.
Note 2- After the US elections 2016 held in November 2016, many media sources speculated that the election results were rigged in favor of Donald Trump by a foreign nation which could be Vladimir Putin led Russia. However, the country denied and Trump announced that some media outlets were painting red against his party by conducting a political witch-hunt through Yellow Journalism.
Note 3- On January 13th,2017, the office of the then-president Barack Obama released a press statement claiming that the US 2016 Polls were indeed influenced by Russia and was discovered in a joint probe conducted by the FBI and CIA. However, all these speculations and press releases lost their fizz as soon as Donald Trump took oath as the 45th US President on January 17th of 2017.
Note 4- The details of the Russian company which tried to influence the Ohio Election Day 2019 will to be out soon!
