![]() ![]() Russia likely to focus on voter suppression in 2020, feds warn states Voting booths set up inside a polling station in Christmas, Florida on November 8, 2016. “We stopped them, caught them and reported them to the authorities,” Sawhney told CNN Tuesday. Voatz co-founder and CEO Nimit Sawhney declined to share specifics of the attempted hack but told CNN Tuesday that it was the only incident from the 2018 election that felt severe enough to turn over to the FBI. Rick Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the University of Michigan, said he did not “have enough information at this moment to offer any response.” The FBI declined to comment on the matter, and the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office as well as Stuart’s office declined to offer further comment. He added that “no legal conclusions whatsoever have been made regarding the conduct of the activity or whether any federal laws were violated.” ![]() ![]() “During the 2018 election cycle, Secretary of State Warner referred to my office what he perceived to be an attempted intrusion by an outside party into the West Virginia military mobile voting system,” Stuart said in prepared remarks Tuesday. The office of West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner had previously communicated to Stuart that suspicious activity against the Voatz app came from IP addresses associated with the University of Michigan, one of the people familiar with the matter told CNN.įBI investigating alleged hacking attempt into mobile voting app during 2018 midterms Michigan is one of the main academic hubs of election security research in the country, housing the trailblazing Michigan Election Security Commission. The sources told CNN that the FBI is investigating a person or people who tried to hack the app as a part of a University of Michigan election security course. Mike Stuart, the US attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, revealed at a press conference Tuesday that an FBI investigation “is currently ongoing” after an unsuccessful attempted intrusion into the Voatz app, which West Virginia has used since 2018 to allow overseas and military voters to vote via smartphone. In 2018, Alaska explored using an online voting system but shuttered the program because of security concerns.An attempted hack into a mobile voting app used during the 2018 midterm elections may have been a student’s attempt to research security vulnerabilities rather than an attempt to alter any votes, three people familiar with the matter told CNN. The researchers said they were forced to reverse engineer an Android version of the app because Voatz hasn't allowed transparent third-party testing of the system.īoston-based Voatz disputed the research methods, issuing a statement that said the analysts used an old version of the app and accused them of acting in "bad faith." The company noted it hasn't had any reported issues in its counting of less than 600 votes over nine pilot elections.Īlthough few voters are expected to cast ballots on such apps in the coming election, the report casts a harsh light on the looming proposition of online voting. Paper: /OnyiOudcuh- MIT CSAIL February 13, 2020 Voatz has already been used in multiple state elections in WV, CO, OR & UT. BREAKING: MIT team identifies security vulnerabilities in voting app Voatz that could allow hackers to change or eliminate votes. ![]()
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