›› Hackers targeted Texas voting database before 2016 election.
Feds say state website singled out, but culprits met with little success
AUSTIN — Hackers targeted Texas and 20 other states prior to the 2016 presidential election, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has formally informed the states.
But the hackers who tried to mess with Texas didn’t get far, officials with the Texas Secretary of State’s office said Monday.
The federal agents said that instead of targeting the state’s voter registration database during the 2016 elections, hackers searched for a vulnerability on the Secretary of State’s public-facing website, according to Sam Taylor, an agency spokesman.
“If anyone was trying to get into the elections system, they were apparently targeting the wrong website,” Taylor said.
The website, www.sos. state.tx.us, is devoid of voter information, he said, and hackers never find a way to crack into it.
The notice received Friday from the Department of Homeland Security serves as the first time the federal government has confirmed to states that they were targeted by hackers in the runup to the 2016 election after nearly a year of speculation.
A department official told Congress in June that states were targeted but declined to disclose which ones.
Some election systems were hacked, but not manipulated, according to the testimony.
The other states targeted include Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Califor-
nia, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, according to the Associated Press.
Allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election have tailed President Donald Trump throughout his tenure amid suggestions officials there tried to swing the election in his favor.
According to testimony before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, the Department of Homeland Security began finding incidents of scanning and probing of state and local election systems in August 2016. A declassified report from national intelligence officials released in January stated that “Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards.”
“There is no complacency in Texas when it comes to protecting the security of our elections system,” Secretary Rolando Pablos said. “We take our responsibility to guard against any and all threats to the integrity of elections extremely seriously and will continue to do so moving forward.”
Texans already thought hackers had tried to meddle in the 2016 elections here after North Texas media outlets reported in June that the Dallas County election administrator confirmed 17 attempts to hack their servers in October.
The confirmation, officials said, came after staff crosschecked hundreds of suspicious or Russianlinked IP addresses provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security with those that attempted to access county servers.
A Dallas-area TV station, WFAA, reported last week that there was no evidence of any attempted or successful Russian hack at the county, and the Secretary of State’s office said “there was no evidence of any ‘attempts’ or ‘targeting’ of Dallas county’s elections systems.”
The elections administrator, Toni Pippins-Poole, stood by early reports that there were attempted hacks, but said none penetrated their system.
“I have to continue to say we were not hacked,” she said. “Our voter registration and our website were not compromised in any way.”
Despite reports from intelligence agencies and local governments that hackers associated with Russia targeted and in some cases successfully hacked systems connected with elections, local officials in Harris County won’t say whether they have seen similar attempts.
Harris County officials have repeatedly refused to say whether there were attempted hacks of their elections registration or website during the 2016 election cycle, and contend that revealing that information could jeopardize the county’s cybersecurity.