The Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Dallas FBI office says there are no indications that any elections office in North Texas has been attacked by a foreign government.
“We have not seen anything specifically in North Texas but we have worked very closely with election and campaign administrators to share with them indicators, to work through scenarios and to ensure they know the right people to contact and the right information to share so that we can quickly identify and mitigate any cyber-related threats to election infrastructure in our area here” said Matthew DeSarno, SAC of the Dallas office.
Elections administrators have said foreign governments have made attempts to hack into their systems in North Texas in prior elections. Attacks have been spotted in other areas of the country. Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe revealed attempts to e-mail voters in other states, and make threats intended to cause discord.
DeSarno declined to say whether such e-mails have been received locally.
“We are interested in continuing to monitor for that kind of activity.” said DeSarno. “We have shared indicators of that activity with the owners of those databases and the owners of those infrastructures and they would be able to ideally detect it and report it to us.”
While complaints of polling place activity rarely rise to a federal level, the U.S Attorney’s office for the Northern District of Texas announced on Monday that it had appointed an assistant to monitor reports of voter fraud.