According to a report from Bloomberg, Russia has been meddling with U.S. election much more than what was previously rumored. It was reported that hackers from Russia have been attacking voting systems in 39 states.
In its report, one of the states - Illinois - saw the hackers gain access to the voter database and compromise as many as 90,000 records. And on another state, theyhave even tried to delete or change data in another state.
Things got worse when NSA documents obtained by The Intercept, mentioned that Russia's GRU military intelligence arm tried to take over the computers of 122 U.S. election officials prior to the November vote. It revealed that the Russian military intelligence launched a hacking campaign against at least one US voting software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to over 100 local election officials.
While the U.S. government believes that the attackers didn't do damage in terms of changing results, the situation was serious enough that President Barack Obama took the complaining to Kremlin using the "red phone". The White House showed the Kremlin proof of the attacks and asked for answers.
But in the end, Obama reportedly decided not to reveal the extent of Russian activity, worrying it would shake the public's faith in the election process.
Officials in the Obama administration accused Russian President Vladimir Putin for attacking the U.S. election and imposed sanctions on the nation. It was later reported that the FBI was doing three separate investigations into Russian election hacking that targeted the Democrats.
Putin denied that the Russians were involved in the hacking of U.S. election. However, he later acknowledged that Russian hacking into the election was "theoretically possible." At the same time, he said that whatever it was, the government had no role in this.
President Donald Trump later knew about this issue, but his administration hasn't taken the problem seriously enough, according an ex-FBI official.
