The Department of Homeland Security said Friday it is “confident” Russia is responsible for recent hacks against the U.S. election system.
“We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities,” said a joint statement from the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there.”
The Obama administration said the “methods and motivations” of the hacks perpetrated by Guccifer 2.0 and posted on WikiLeaks and DCLeaks.com are consistent with “Russian-directed efforts.”
Some U.S. states have seen “scanning and probing” of election-related systems that can be traced back to servers in Russia, but the U.S. government can’t verify it was perpetrated by the Kremlin. The U.S. intelligence community said it would be “extremely difficult” for another country to alter actual ballot counts or election results.
“This assessment is based on the decentralized nature of our election system in this country and the number of protections state and local election officials have in place,” the statement said. “States ensure that voting machines are not connected to the Internet, and there are numerous checks and balances as well as extensive oversight at multiple levels built into our election process.”
Russia was widely believed to have been behind hacks on the Democratic National Committee and other political officials disclosed earlier this year, but this is the first public acknowledgment by the Obama administration that the Kremlin was behind the cyberattacks. Analysts have speculated that Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has found an admirer in Donald Trump, is attempting to interfere with the U.S. election system in hopes of tipping the ballots in favor of the Republican.
The U.S.-Russia relationship has been particularly fraught over the last week as Washington on Monday officially stopped talks with Moscow aimed at ending Syria’s civil war. Russia responded by suspending a treaty with the Americans that addressed cleaning up weapons-grade plutonium and halting agreements on nuclear, energy and uranium.
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