Although those news resources belonging to Russia are spreading misinformation on the social media that the US Vote Registration database was hacked and the information is been circulating on the dark web from the past couple of days, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency(CISA) has released a press statement or rather was forced to release an update to the media that no such thing happened till date and might never happen….hope their cyber-attack thwarting measures click in all cylinders.
Yesterday, a news story published in Kommersant-a Russian newspaper claimed that a database related to Michigan was hacked by a hackers group and the data related to 7.6 million voters was available for sale on the dark web. The news resource also claimed that the voter information related to voters from Florida, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Arkansas was also accessed, copied, and leaked online.
On contrary to what is been said in the media, Michigan Voter Registration officials reacted swiftly to the news story and claimed that it was being exaggerated by the Russian media. And the data in question was publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act.
Chris Krebs, the Director of CISA debunked the information spread as false or fake news in his recent tweet and added that it will be critical for the next few months to maintain calm and not react to such claims.
Furthermore, a joint statement released by the FBI along with CISA claims that there have been no cyberattacks this year on the voter registration databases of the United States…….thank god- no replay of the US 2016 Polls hack!
Note- The fake news of the US Voter Registration Database hack was been circulated just after Facebook and Twitter announced that they are removing thousands of profiles associated with Russian web resource ‘PeaceData’- an agency linked to the state-funded IRA.
