An official for the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has said that election systems in 21 states were targeted in Russian cyber attacks in the 2016 presidential election.
But Jeanette Manfra, undersecretary for cybersercurity at DHS, told the Senate intelligence committee that she could not disclose the identities of the states because it's up to them to decide whether to say they had been targets.
It's “important to protect the confidentiality we have and the trust we have with that community,” Ms Manfra said.
Both the Senate's and House of Representatives' intelligence committees held hearings on Wednesday as part of their ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the US election.
During the House's proceeding, former Homeland Secretary Jeh Johnson testified that he knows of “no evidence that through cyber intrusions, votes were altered or suppressed in some way.”
In his opening statement to the committee, Mr Johnson said that he was “not in a position to know whether the successful Russian government-directed hacks of the [Democratic National Committee] and elsewhere did in fact alter public opinion and thereby alter the outcome of the presidential election.”
Democratic congresswoman Jackie Speier asked Mr Johnson how he could be be confident that no votes were altered, to which the former official replied that he made this claim based upon what he knows. However, he has not had access to classified information for five months, he said. Mr Johnson served as Secretary of Homeland Security from December 2013 until Donald Trump was inaugurated as president in January.
He added that he's “not sure” he had the authority at DHS to probe whether votes were altered.
