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By Miriam Raftery
September 24, 2017 (Sacramento) -- “Today, my office was informed for the first time by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that Russian cyber actors scanned California’s Internet-facing systems in 2016,” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced on Friday.
California was among 21 states notified of Russia’s attempt to hack their election systems before the 2016 presidential election.
The foreign hackers scanned California’s systems seeking weakness in a computer network, similar to a burglar looking for unlocked doors in a house, Padilla added.
The intrusion is troubling since despite California’s cyber security protections that include routine monitoring, the state did not detect a break in. However, Homeland Security “confirmed that they have no evidence that any systems were penetrated or compromised,” the Secretary of State reports.
Padilla faulted the federal government for taking over a year to report the hack attempts, noting that withholding such critical information from election officials amounts to “a detriment to the security of our elections and our democracy.”
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