The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age

by David E. Sanger

In Illinois, there was a deeper panic: the registration system was pierced and voter information siphoned off. The forensics suggested the hack was engineered by known Russian groups. Inside Johnson’s homeland-security headquarters, the cyber teams worried that once hackers got into a registration system, they could change Social Security numbers or delete voters from the rolls. “That’s all it would have taken to create chaos on Election Day,” one senior White House official told me. “You didn’t have to change much.” Few said so at the time, but months after the election Homeland Security said it had seen evidence of similar probes into the systems of roughly three dozen other states. No one would say why they did not reveal that information at the time.