FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. _ The FBI concluded that Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election included attempts to infiltrate Florida elections offices, an operation that "gain(ed) access to the network of at least one Florida county government.
Information about the FBI's findings came out on Thursday, as part of the public release of Special Counsel Robert Muller's report on Russian attempts to influence the presidential election.
The attempt to infiltrate Florida's elections system has been reported before; the Mueller report provided a few more details.
State and local elections officials on Thursday repeated what they've said before: that they have no evidence that Florida elections systems were infiltrated by the Russians.
"The 2016 elections in Florida were not hacked. The Florida Voter Registration System was and remains secure, and official results or vote tallies were not changed," said a statement from the Florida Department of State, which is responsible for overseeing elections.
The agency said it "has no knowledge or evidence of any successful hacking attempt at the county level during the 2016 elections. Upon learning of the new information released in the Mueller report, the Department immediately reached out to the FBI to inquire which county may have been accessed, and they declined to share this information with us."
The Mueller report said that the GRU, the Russian Military intelligence agency, attempted to gain access to election systems.
In November 2016, the Mueller report said, "the GRU sent spearphishing emails to over 120 email accounts used by Florida county officials responsible for administering the 2016 U.S. election. The spearphishing emails contained an attached Word document coed with malicious software (commonly referred to as a Trojan) that permitted the GRU to access the infected computer.
"The FBI was separately responsible for this investigation. We understand the FBI believes that this operation enabled the GRU to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government," the report said. The Special Counsel's Office "did not independently verify" the FBI's belief and "did not undertake the investigative steps that would have been necessary to do so."
An indictment as part of Mueller's investigation alleged that an officer in the Russian military who worked in Russian intelligence and his co-conspirators relied on an email account designed to look as if it came from a vendor used by election officials.
The Mueller report said that in August 2016, "GRU officers targeted employees of (redacted), a voting technology companies that developed software used by numerous U.S. counties to manage voter rolls, and installed malware on the company network."
An elections system vendor, VR Systems, which wasn't named in the Mueller report, repeatedly denied accounts in 2017 that information was stolen from it and used to send phishing emails to local elections officials. A VR Systems executive repeated those denials at a May 2018 convention of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections in Fort Lauderdale.
Last year, supervisors of elections in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties said last year they had no reason to believe their voter registration rolls had been compromised by hackers.
