A top-secret document leaked from the NSA archives reveals a possible attempt by Russian hackers to tamper with American election results.
The NSA finds itself once again at the center of a scandal, as it is revealed that the secret service knew about the successful attempt by Russian operatives to breach one of the suppliers of the American voting system, just a few weeks before the 2016 presidential elections.
According to The Intercept, the information comes from a classified, highly secret, NSA report, the United States National Security Agency. The report arrives exactly at the moment when Real Leigh Winner, a 25-year-old private employee of the NSA, is accused of intercepting classified documents from a government agency and anonymously sending them to a news agency. If the two events are combined, it becomes quite clear that Winner is likely the new NSA whistleblower, after Edward Snowden.
It has already become known that hackers from the Fancy Bear group, which is said to be state-sponsored by Russia, breached the email accounts of high-ranking officials and candidates of the Democratic Party during the American primary election period, leaking confidential information online. This ultimately led to numerous revelations that damaged the image of the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and helped in the election of Donald Trump.
To date, everything indicated that the US vote-counting system was not affected by the Russians' hacking attempts. However, the report by The Intercept shows that the Russian secret service GRU managed to hack at least one supplier of electronic voting systems in the US and sent phishing emails to more than a hundred local election officials before the election.
The document published by Intercept is dated May 5, 2017, and appears to be a detailed governmental report regarding the Russian attempt to interfere in last year's elections.
While this particular document does not mention the company that may have been breached, there are indications that it could be VR Systems, a supplier of equipment and electronic voting services in eight different US states.
Even though it is not clear how successful the Russian hacking attempts were, and whether they had a direct influence on Trump's victory or not, this evidence is enough to generate a multitude of doubts about the entire voting process.
