Kremlin denies report of voting software hacking
The Kremlin has denied claims from a U.S. government intelligence report that Russian hackers attacked at least one U.S. voting software supplier before last year's presidential election.
The classified National Security Agency report, which was published online on Monday by The Intercept, said Russian military intelligence agency GRU attacked the software company and sent spear-phishing emails to local election officials around October and November.
Dmitry Peskov, spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, denied the allegations Tuesday, saying that the Kremlin did not see "any evidence to prove this information is true."
"Apart from this claim which absolutely does not conform to reality, we have not seen any other information nor heard any arguments for the reliability of this information and we resolutely deny the possibility that such a thing could have happened," Peskov told journalists, adding that he had not read the report.
The Justice Department has since charged federal government contractor, 25-year-old Reality Leigh Winner, with removing classified material from a government facility and leaking it to an unidentified news outlet.
This came on the same day the online news site The Intercept posted the report that Russian government hackers carried out a cyberattack against one U.S. voting software vendor last August and launched a spear-phishing attack targeting local U.S. organizations days before the 2016 U.S. election, according to a highly classified report within the National Security Agency.
CBS News confirmed the authenticity of the report Monday after the 5-page document was published by The Intercept.
The report did not say whether the hacking had any effect on election results.
