Anthem of Ukraine and servers in the Russian Federation: in the United States exposed a threat to election - Politico

US officials lack money and experience to guarantee software security for US election, journalists said. This is evidenced by cooperation with a company that gives orders for outsource and does not monitor that the performers are citizens of the Russian Federation. The Russian programmer was engaged in software to vote in the US Presidential Election in November 2024. The program did not contain a harmful code, but turned to the server located in the Russian Federation.

Cybersecurity experts explained that in this way, the attackers could change voter lists. About problems in the US elections were told on the Politico portal. Journalists spoke about an incident that occurred in the US state of New Hampshire. Local officials decided in 2023 to check that everything was fine with the database and the WSD Digital, which was engaged in this database. It turned out that WSD Digital handed over some of the tasks to other companies to the outsour.

This was concerned because unidentified persons were accessed to the list of people who had to elect a new US President in November 2024. The check was entrusted to the ReversingLabs cybersecurity companies, the article is said. Experts found that the task was performed by a small company from the Russian Federation, which introduced several "surprises" into the software.

The report, which was prepared as a result of the audit, did not indicate clear damage, but it could compromise the November elections in the United States, officials. They managed to "prevent catastrophe" because they found the problem in time and eliminated it with the help of cybersecurity professionals, journalists explained. ReversingLabs have found a number of problems with the software created with the participation of the Russian company.

Cybersecurity experts explained that through Russian servers, the attackers could penetrate the voter database and make changes to the lists. In addition, the presence in the code of the Ukrainian anthem could compromise the results and cause suspicion of "conspiracy" in favor of a candidate. Politico stressed that half a year studied problems with the US election software. They found out that the New Hepshire problem was removed on time. However, journalists stressed that there may be other gaps.

They called the reason for this situation, among other things, the lack of funding and the lack of certain knowledge of officials. In their view, this leads to the fact that orders are not fulfilled by the best companies in the IT services market. It should be noted that after the US presidential race in 2016, US government officials initiated the investigation into Russia's possible influence on the election campaign.

According to the FBI, Russian President Vladimir Putin personally agreed to the Lakhta project, which was to help Donald Trump to defeat the rival Hillary Clinton. For this purpose, thousands of fake accounts were created on social networks, spreading messages on behalf of "ordinary Americans". As a result, the FBI could not bring the direct involvement of Trump in this campaign, but he eventually bypassed Clinton.