An elections administrator was sure the Russians hacked her county. She was way off.
Oct 3, 2017 11:35 pm
Since June, Toni Pippins-Poole was adamant that Russian hackers had attempted to disrupt Dallas County’s election results in the November presidential election. She made the claim, stood by it, and repeated it.
As it turns out, she had just misunderstood some technical explanations all along, according to a Dallas Morning News report.
Her initial claims
Pippins-Poole claimed that federal authorities told her 17 IP addresses linked to Russian hackers had attempted to breach Dallas County servers.
Even County Commissioner John Wiley Price was on board with the claim.
“The fact that there were that many attempts says they expected to disrupt,” Price said in June. “If you disrupt the voter file, then when people are trying to validate at the polls, you got mass confusion.”
What really happened
The Department of Homeland Security sent a summary that it had found “23 occurrences of 18 distinct vulnerabilities” in Dallas County’s public websites.
Pippins-Poole thought an “occurrence” was an actual hacking attempt. In fact, an occurrence just meant there was a vulnerability in the Dallas County system, not that it had been exploited by hackers.
“A lot of this I really don’t understand,” Pippins-Poole said. “They did detect 23 occurrences. If they’re saying that that does not mean hacking attempts, I don’t know.”
In layman’s terms
For a clear and simple explanation of what happened, here’s Dallas County Chief Information Officer Stanley Victrum:
“It’s just like me standing on the outside of the county administrative building describing, ‘You’ve got a window that’s cracked,’ ” Victrum said. “It doesn’t necessarily say somebody went through the window and stole something.”
Turns out that even though Russia may be involved in a lot of shady activity in the world, they weren’t hacking Dallas County.
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