Russia accused of hacking US voting system and interfering with the 2016 election

There is only a month to go until the election showdown between Trump and Clinton finally comes to an end. There is a great deal riding on the result of this particular election and we have already seen DNC servers hacked.

There has been speculation about who may have been responsible for this security breach, but now the US has pointed the finger firmly at Putin's Russia. Russian hackers are accused of hacking into the Democratic National Committee's servers and trying "to interfere with the US election process".

This is not the first time blame has been placed at Russia's door; some US officials, as well as Hillary Clinton, have already accused Russian hackers of stealing 19,000 Democratic Party emails. But now the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security have issued a joint statement making it clear that this is also the view of the Obama administration.

The statement says:

The US Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from US persons and institutions, including from US political organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow -- the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

Tensions are already running fairly high between the US and Russia, and it's not clear what the fallout of this accusation could be. Russia is unlikely to hold its hands up to the hacking, and a spokesman for Vladimir Putin has already rubbished the claims. He fired a shot back at the US in a statement to a news agency:

Every day Putin's website gets attacked by several tens of thousands of hackers. A lot of these attacks are traced to the territory of the USA, but we do not blame the White House or Langley each time.

Despite the accusation levelled at Russia, the US statement from the DHS and the ODNI says that it would be difficult to actually influence the outcome of the election:

Some states have also recently seen scanning and probing of their election-related systems, which in most cases originated from servers operated by a Russian company. However, we are not now in a position to attribute this activity to the Russian Government. The USIC and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assess that it would be extremely difficult for someone, including a nation-state actor, to alter actual ballot counts or election results by cyber attack or intrusion. This assessment is based on the decentralized nature of our election system in this country and the number of protections state and local election officials have in place. States ensure that voting machines are not connected to the Internet, and there are numerous checks and balances as well as extensive oversight at multiple levels built into our election process.

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