look news india
Washington/International Desk. Just days before voting in the important midterm elections in the United States, a major cyber attack has occurred on the country’s top election monitoring system. The servers and systems of the US Federal Election Commission (FEC), which monitors election donations and expenditure of political parties, candidates and Political Action Committees (PACs), have been targeted by hackers. Immediately after this suspected cyber attack, as a precautionary measure, the Commission’s major online services and important electronic filing systems (E-Filing System) have been taken offline.
In these last days before the elections, when the campaign is at its peak and funds worth millions of dollars are being spent like water, the Commission’s filing system has come to a standstill. Analysts believe that this technical disruption is having a serious impact on transparent records of political funding and mandatory 48-hour financial disclosures.
According to media reports and information quoting internal communications of the Commission, unknown ‘bad actors’ (hackers) tried hard to break into the FEC’s internal network late Monday night. As soon as signs of suspicious activities and unauthorized access were detected in the system, the cyber security team shut down the electronic filing gateway to avoid the risk of data leakage.
The Commission has posted a brief technical notice on its website stating that the electronic filing system is down due to a technical glitch and IT experts are working to restore it as soon as possible. Although the Commission has refrained from directly confirming in public statements the data breach or the hacking of the entire system, Reuters and major global news agencies have confirmed the cyber attack after leaking of internal emails. At present it is not clear when the service will be completely normal.
After this incident, it was natural for the common American voters to raise the question whether the security of voting and ballot paper is in danger? On this, election analysts and security officials have clarified the situation and said that the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is not an organization that conducts voting, operates ballot boxes or electronic voting machines (EVM/Tabulators). In the United States, the responsibility for conducting voting falls directly under the responsibility of states and local county administrations.
Therefore this cyber attack will not have any direct impact on voting by citizens or the actual voting results. However, its biggest and most lethal impact has been on electoral transparency. In the final weeks of voting, candidates are required to upload information about large donations to the FEC portal within 48 hours, which is tracked live by the media and public. Due to closure of the filing system, it has become impossible to find out which industrialist or organization is secretly investing millions of dollars in support of which candidate in the last round of elections.
As soon as this sensitive incident came to light, American investigative agencies have come on full alert mode. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have begun a digital forensic investigation. Agencies are trying to find out whether the attack was a common cyber crime carried out by a ransomware group, or whether a foreign cyber espionage agency was behind it to disrupt the American democratic process.
US intelligence agencies have been warning for a long time about the targeting of election-related infrastructure by hacker groups backed by Russia, China and Iran. Although no agency has publicly blamed any specific country, the attack right on the heels of the elections has raised a major question mark over US cyber security preparedness and the robustness of critical data systems.