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Hackers stole over 2 billion roubles from accounts in central bank Russia

A lock icon, signifying an encrypted Internet connection, is seen on an Internet Explorer browser in a photo illustration

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Hackers have stolen more than 2 billion roubles ($31.3 million) from banks’ correspondent accounts in Russian central bank, the central bank official Artyom Sychyov told a briefing on Friday.

He added that hackers attempted to stole around 5 billion roubles.

Hackers broke into accounts at the Russian central bank earlier this year by faking a client’s credentials and attempted to steal $45 million, the bank said in a report released earlier on Friday.

(Reporting by Andrey Ostroukh and Elena Fabrichnaya; writing by Katya Golubkova; editing by Vladimir Soldatkin)

Cyber fraudsters take money out of 20,000 Tesco Bank accounts

A Tesco supermarket is seen, in west London

By Estelle Shirbon

LONDON (Reuters) – The banking arm of Britain’s biggest retailer Tesco was scrambling on Monday to deal with an online attack over the weekend on 40,000 customers’ accounts, 20,000 of which had money removed.

The hack is the first on a British bank known to have resulted in customers losing money, adding to growing concerns about the British financial sector’s vulnerabilities to cyber attacks, which have jumped in frequency over the past two years.

Tesco Bank, which manages 136,000 current accounts, stopped all online transactions while it worked to resume normal service, although customers could still use their bank cards in shops and to withdraw money from cash machines.

“Any financial loss that results from this fraudulent activity will be borne by the bank,” Tesco Bank Chief Executive Benny Higgins told BBC radio. “Customers are not at financial risk.”

“We think it would be relatively small amounts that have come out but we’re still working on that,” he said, adding that he expected the cost of refunding customers would be “a big number but not a huge number”.

Shares in supermarket chain Tesco, which wholly owns Tesco Bank, were down 1.2 percent at 200.20 pence by 1030 GMT.

The bank is a minnow in Britain’s retail banking market, with about 2 percent of current accounts, and represents only a small part of Tesco’s overall business.

It contributed 503 million pounds ($623.4 million) to the group’s revenue of 24.4 billion pounds in the first half of its 2016-17 financial year.

But while the financial hit to the group may be limited, Tesco Bank risks serious reputational damage from an attack that affected 29 percent of its customer current accounts.

Other British banks have been targeted by cyber attacks in recent years, but the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) which regulates the sector said it was not aware of any previous incident in which customers had lost money.

Reported attacks on financial institutions in Britain have risen from just five in 2014 to over 75 so far this year, according to FCA data, but bank executives and providers of security systems say there are many more unreported attacks.

HSBC issued a series of apologies to customers earlier this year after its UK personal banking websites were shut down by a “denial of service” attack, but no customer funds were at threat during that breach.

Cliff Moyce, global head of financial services at DataArt, a network of technology consulting and software services firms, said reduced staffing levels over the weekend were likely to have been one of the reasons for the impact of the hack.

“The clever part was doing it over the weekend when banks are typically understaffed, and will respond more slowly,” he said in a comment emailed to media.

“Automated fraud detection systems appear to have worked well, but a lack of people at desks will not have helped.”

Other well-known British brands hit by significant cyber attacks over the past year include telecoms firms TalkTalk and Vodafone, business software provider Sage and electronic goods retailer Dixons Carphone.

(Additional reporting by Michael Holden, James Davey and Huw Jones; Editing by Greg Mahlich)

U.S. Boosting cyber defenses but not police presence for election

A man types on a computer keyboard in this illustration picture

By Julia Harte and Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Federal and state authorities are beefing up cyber defenses against potential electronic attacks on voting systems ahead of U.S. elections on Nov. 8, but taking few new steps to guard against possible civil unrest or violence.

The threat of computer hacking and the potential for violent clashes is darkening an already rancorous presidential race between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, amid fears that Russia or other actors could spread political misinformation online or perhaps tamper with voting.

To counter the cyber threat, all but two U.S. states have accepted help from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to probe and scan voter registration and election systems for vulnerabilities, a department official told Reuters.

Ohio has asked a cyber protection unit of the National Guard, a reserve force within the U.S. military, for assistance to protect the state’s systems.

On Thursday, Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan and her cyber security team met with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the DHS, in addition to state-level agencies, to discuss cyber threats, said Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Reagan.

Cyber security experts and U.S. officials say chances that a hack could alter election outcomes are remote, in part because voting machines are typically not connected to the internet.

But the FBI sent a flash alert in August to states after detecting breaches in voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois.

ARMED GROUPS

Unidentified intelligence officials told NBC News on Thursday that there is no specific warning about an Election Day attack, but they remain concerned that hackers from Russia or elsewhere may try to disrupt the process, likely by spreading misinformation by manipulating social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

DHS cyber security experts plan to hold a media briefing on Friday to discuss the agency’s efforts with states to boost the security of their voting and election systems.

The potential for violence around the election has loomed in the background of the campaign for months. Armed groups around the country have pledged in unprecedented numbers to monitor voting sites for signs of election fraud.

Voter intimidation reported at polling sites so far prompted Democrats to accuse Trump of a “campaign of vigilante voter intimidation” in four states on Monday.

But local authorities surveyed by Reuters on Thursday in five states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin and Florida – said they were not increasing election-related law enforcement personnel or resources above 2012 levels.

‘A LOT OF TALK, LITTLE ACTION’

The FBI, which designates one special agent from each of its 56 field offices for election crime matters, has not increased its numbers or given staff additional training this year, said an FBI spokeswoman.

There has been no “substantive change” in the number of personnel deployed by the rest of the Justice Department, which designates Assistant U.S. Attorneys and federal prosecutors within the agency’s Public Integrity Section to handle election crimes, according to a spokesman.

Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, which represents hundreds of thousands of U.S. officers, said cops are taking the same security measures they would take for any large event. He said he expects the vows by militias to monitor the polls to be “a lot of talk, little action.”

Civil rights groups said deploying more police officers to the polls can actually intimidate voters.

“The presence of law enforcement can have a chilling effect on the electorate,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a watchdog group. “That’s something we want to discourage.”

(Additional reporting by Andy Sullivan in Washington; Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh and Bill Rigby)

China to recall up to 10,000 webcams after U.S. Hack

A hand is silhouetted in front of a computer screen in this picture illustration.

By Sijia Jiang

HONG KONG (Reuters) – A recall of webcams linked to a major cyber attack in the United States last week will involve up to 10,000 of the compromised devices, Chinese manufacturer Hangzhou Xiongmai Technology Co told Reuters on Tuesday.

Xiongmai said it would recall some surveillance cameras sold in the U.S. on Monday after security researchers identified they had been targeted in the attack, which rendered Twitter, Spotify and dozens of other major websites unavailable.

Friday’s cyber attack alarmed security experts because it represented a new type of threat rooted in the proliferation of simple devices such as webcams which often lack proper security.

Hackers found a way to harness hundreds of thousands of them globally to flood a target with so much traffic that it couldn’t cope, cutting access to some of the world’s best known websites.

The disruptions come at a time of unprecedented fears about the cyber threat in the United States, where hackers have breached political organizations and election agencies.

Liu Yuexin, Xiongmai’s marketing director, told Reuters the company would recall the first few batches of surveillance cameras made in 2014 that monitor rooms or shops for personal, rather than industrial, use.

Xiongmai had now fixed loopholes in earlier products, prompting users to change default passwords and having telnet access blocked, Liu said. He declined to give an exact number of vulnerable devices, but estimated it at less than 10,000.

Devices using the firm’s components in China and elsewhere were unlikely to suffer from similar attacks because they were more frequently used for industrial purposes and within more secure intranet networks, he added.

“The reason why there has been such a massive attack in the U.S. and (one) is not likely going to be in China is that most of our products in China are industrial devices used within a closed intranet only,” Liu said.

“Those in the U.S. are consumer devices exposed in the public domain,” he added.

Liu said surveillance cameras with core modules made by Xiongmai were widely used for banks, shops and housing estate surveillance in China. The firm is a “top three supplier” in China, he said, but declined to name specific clients.

Beyond the recall, Liu added the firm may take measures to enhance the safety of its products by migrating to safer operating systems and adding further encryption.

“Internet of Things (IoT) devices have been subject to cyber attacks because they are mostly based on the Linux open source system,” he said. “Our department had been looking to develop products based on other systems since 2015 and plan to do more in the future.”

(Editing by Adam Jourdan and Alexander Smith)

Two Major Cyber Attacks disrupt service on major sites

An attendee looks at a monitor at the Parsons booth during the 2016 Black Hat cyber-security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S

By Jim Finkle and Dustin Volz

(Reuters) – Cyber attacks targeting the internet infrastructure provider Dyn disrupted service on major sites such as Twitter and Spotify on Friday, mainly affecting users on the U.S. East Coast.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible and Gillian Christensen of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the agency was “investigating all potential causes.”

Dyn said it had resolved one attack, which disrupted operations for about two hours, but disclosed a second attack a few hours later that was causing further disruptions.

In addition to the social network Twitter and music-streamer Spotify, the discussion site Reddit, hospitality booking service Airbnb and The Verge news site were among the companies whose services were reported to be down.

Amazon.com Inc’s web services division, one of the world’s biggest cloud computing companies, also disclosed an outage that lasted several hours on Friday morning. Amazon could not immediately be reached for comment.

The attacks were the latest in an increasingly menacing string of distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks disrupting internet sites by overwhelming servers with web traffic.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned on Oct. 14 that hackers were using a powerful new approach to launch these campaigns – infecting routers, printers, smart TVs and other connected devices with malware that turns them into “bot” armies that can launch DDoS attacks.

“We have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed DNS infrastructure,” the company said on its website. “Our engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue.”

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn, told Reuters he was not sure if the outages at Dyn and Amazon were connected.

“We provide service to Amazon but theirs is a complex network so it is hard to be definitive about causality at the moment,” he said.

Dyn is a Manchester, New Hampshire-based provider of services for managing domain name servers (DNS), which act as switchboards connecting internet traffic. Requests to access sites are transmitted through DNS servers that direct them to computers that host websites.

Dyn’s customers include some of the world’s biggest corporations and Internet firms, such as Pfizer, Visa, Netflix and Twitter, SoundCloud and BT.

(Reporting By Jim Finkle in Boston and Dustin Volz in Washington; Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in Frankurt and Malathi Nayak in New York, Jeff Mason in Washington; Editing by Bill Trott)

Attack on web provider disrupts some sites located on U.S. East Coast

A padlock is displayed at the Alert Logic booth during the 2016 Black Hat cyber-security conference in Las Vegas, Nevada,

By Jim Finkle and Dustin Volz

(Reuters) – Service of some major internet sites was disrupted for several hours on Friday morning as internet infrastructure provider Dyn said it was hit by a cyber attack that disrupted traffic mainly on the U.S. East Coast.

Social network Twitter &, music-streamer Spotify, discussion site Reddit and The Verge news site were among the companies whose services were reported to be down on Friday morning.

It was unclear who was responsible for the Dyn attack, which the company said disrupted operations for about two hours.

It is the latest in an increasingly menacing string of “denial of service” attacks disrupting internet sites by overwhelming servers with web traffic. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned on Oct. 14 that hackers were infecting routers, printers, smart TVs and other connected devices to build powerful armies of “bots” that can shut down websites.

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn, told Reuters he was not sure if the outages at Dyn and Amazon were connected.

“We provide service to Amazon but theirs is a complex network so it is hard to be definitive about causality at the moment,” he said.

Salesforce.com Inc’s Heroku cloud-computing service platform, which runs on Amazon Web Services, disclosed a service outage that it said was related to a denial of service attack “against one of our DNS providers.”

Dyn said it was still trying to determine how the attack led to the outage.

“Our first priority over the last couple of hours has been our customers and restoring their performance,” Dyn Executive Vice President Scott Hilton said in a statement.

He said the problem was resolved at about 9:20 a.m. EDT (1320 GMT). It earlier reported its engineers were working to respond to an “attack” that mainly affected users on the East Coast.

An FBI representative said she had no immediate comment.

Dyn’s customers include some of the world’s biggest corporations and Internet firms, such as Pfizer, Visa, Netflix and Twitter, SoundCloud and BT.

Attacking a large DNS provider can create massive disruptions because such firms are responsible for forwarding large volumes of internet traffic.

(Reporting By Jim Finkle in Boston and Dustin Volz in Washington; Additional reporting by Eric Auchard in Frankurt and Malathi Nayak in New York; Editing by Bill Trott)

British banks keep cyber attacks under wraps to protect image

By Lawrence White

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s banks are not reporting the full extent of cyber attacks to regulators for fear of punishment or bad publicity, bank executives and providers of security systems say.

Reported attacks on financial institutions in Britain have risen from just 5 in 2014 to 75 so far this year, data from Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) show.

However, bankers and experts in cyber-security say many more attacks are taking place. In fact, banks are under almost constant attack, Shlomo Touboul, Chief Executive of Israeli-based cyber security firm Illusive Networks said.

Touboul cites the example of one large global financial institution he works with which experiences more than two billion such “events” a month, ranging from an employee receiving a malicious email to user or system-generated alerts of attacks or glitches.

Machine defenses filter those down to 200,000, before a human team cuts that to 200 “real” events a month, he added.

Banks are not obliged to reveal every such instance as cyber attacks fall under the FCA’s provision for companies to report any event that could have a material impact, unlike in the U.S. where forced disclosure makes reporting more consistent.

“There is a gray area…Banks are in general fulfilling their legal obligations but there is also a moral requirement to warn customers of potential losses and to share information with the industry,” Ryan Rubin, UK Managing Director, Security & Privacy at consultant Protiviti, said.

SWIFT ACTION

Banks are not alone in their reluctance to disclose every cyber attack. Of the five million fraud and 2.5 million cyber-related crimes occurring annually in the UK, only 250,000 are being reported, government data show.

But while saving them from bad publicity or worried customers, failure to report more serious incidents, even when they are unsuccessful, deprives regulators of information that could help prevent further attacks, the sources said.

A report published in May by Marsh and industry lobby group TheCityUK concluded that Britain’s financial sector should create a cyber forum comprising bank board members and risk officers to promote better information sharing.

Security experts said that while reporting all low level attacks such as email “phishing” attempts would overload authorities with unnecessary information, some banks are not sharing data on more harmful intrusions because of concerns about regulatory action or damage to their brand.

The most serious recent known attack was on the global SWIFT messaging network in February, but staff from five firms that provide cyber security products and advice to banks in Britain told Reuters they have seen first-hand examples of banks choosing not to report breaches, despite the FCA making public pleas for them to do so, the most recent in September.

“When I moved from law enforcement to banking and saw what banks knew, the amount of information at their disposal, I thought ‘wow’, I never had that before,” Troels Oerting, Group Chief Information Security Officer at Barclays and former head of Europol’s Cyber Crime Unit, said.

Oerting, who joined Barclays in February last year, said since then banks’ sharing of information with authorities has improved dramatically and Barclays shares all its relevant information on attacks with regulators.

Staff from five firms that provide cyber security products and advice to banks in Britain told Reuters they have seen first-hand examples of banks choosing not to report breaches.

“Banks are dramatically under-reporting attacks, they do what’s legally required but out of embarrassment or fear of punishment they aren’t giving the whole picture,” one of the sources, who declined to be named because he did not want to be identified criticizing his firm’s customers, said.

Apart from Barclays, the other major British banks all declined to comment on their disclosures.

The Bank of England declined to comment and the FCA did not respond to requests for comment.

KEEPING SECRETS

Companies that use external security systems also do not always inform them of attacks, the sources said.

“Our customers sometimes detect attacks but don’t tell us,” Touboul, whose firm helps protect banks’ SWIFT payment networks by luring attackers to decoy systems, said.

Hackers used the bank messaging system that helps transmit billions of dollars around the world every day to steal $81 million in one of the largest reported cyber-heists.

Targeted attacks, in which organized criminals penetrate bank systems and then lurk for months to identify and profile key executives and accounts, are becoming more common, David Ferbrache, technical director Cybersecurity at KPMG and former head of cyber and space at the UK Ministry of Defended, said.

“The lesson of the SWIFT attack is that the global banking system is heavily interconnected and dependent on the trust and security of component members, so more diligence in controls and more information sharing is vital,” Ferbrache said.

“Big banks are spending enormous amounts of money, $400-500 million a year, but there are still vulnerabilities in their supply chains and in executives’ home networks, and organized crime groups are shifting their focus accordingly,” Yuri Frayman, CEO of Los Angeles-based cyber security provider Zenedge, said.

BRAND DAMAGE

Banks are increasingly sensitive to the brand damage caused by IT failings, perceiving customers to care just as deeply about security and stable service as loan or deposit rates.

Former RBS Chief Executive Stephen Hester waived his bonus in 2012 over a failed software update which caused chaos for thousands of bank customers.

And HSBC issued multiple apologies to customers after its UK personal banking websites were shuttered by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, following earlier unrelated IT glitches.

“People don’t care about a 0.1 percent interest rate change but ‘will this bank do the utmost to keep my money and information safe?'” Oerting said.

(Editing by Sinead Cruise and Alexander Smith)

‘No doubt’ Russia behind hacks on U.S. election system: senior Democrat

By Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A senior Democratic lawmaker said Sunday he had “no doubt” that Russia was behind recent hacking attempts targeting state election systems, and urged the Obama administration to publicly blame Moscow for trying to undermine confidence in the Nov. 8 presidential contest.

The remarks from Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, come amid heightened concerns among U.S. and state officials about the security of voting machines and databases, and unsubstantiated allegations from Republican candidate Donald Trump that the election could be “rigged.”

“I have no doubt [this is Russia]. And I don’t think the administration has any doubt,” Schiff said during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”

Schiff’s call to name and shame the Kremlin came a week after Trump questioned widely held conclusions made privately by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia is responsible for the hacking activity.

“It could be Russia, but it could also be China,” Trump said during a televised debate with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. “It also could be somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”

On Saturday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said hackers have probed the voting systems of many U.S. states but there is no sign that they have manipulated any voting data.

Schiff said he doubted hackers could falsify vote tallies in a way to affect the election outcome. Officials and experts have said the decentralized and outdated nature of U.S. voting technology makes such hacks more unlikely.

But cyber attacks on voter registration systems could “sow discord” on election day, Schiff said. He further added that leaks of doctored emails would be difficult to disprove and could “be election altering.”

The National Security Agency, FBI and DHS all concluded weeks ago that Russian intelligence agencies conducted, directed or coordinated all the major cyberattacks on U.S. political organizations, including the Democratic National Committee, and individuals, a U.S. official who is participating in the investigations said on Sunday.

However, the official said, White House officials have resisted naming the Russians publicly because doing so could result in escalating cyberattacks, and because it is considered impossible to offer public, unclassified proof of the allegation.

Schiff and Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate intelligence committee, said last month they had concluded Russian intelligence agencies were “making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election.”

(Reporting by Dustin Volz and John Walcott; Editing by Nick Zieminski)

Yahoo says hackers stole data from 500 million accounts

By Dustin Volz

(Reuters) – Yahoo Inc said on Thursday that at least 500 million of its accounts were hacked in 2014 by what it believed was a state-sponsored actor, a theft that appeared to be the world’s biggest known cyber breach by far.

Cyber thieves may have stolen names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and encrypted passwords, the company said. But unprotected passwords, payment card data and bank account information did not appear to have been compromised, signaling that some of the most valuable user data was not taken.

The attack on Yahoo was unprecedented in size, more than triple other large attacks on sites such as eBay Inc, and it comes to light at a difficult time for Yahoo.

Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer is under pressure to shore up the flagging fortunes of the site founded in 1994, and the company in July agreed to a $4.83 billion cash sale of its internet business to Verizon Communications Inc.

“This is the biggest data breach ever,” said well-known cryptologist Bruce Schneier, adding that the impact on Yahoo and its users remained unclear because many questions remain, including the identity of the state-sponsored hackers behind it.

On its website on Thursday, Yahoo encouraged users to change their passwords but did not require it.

Although the attack happened in 2014, Yahoo only discovered the incursion after August reports of a separate breach. While that report turned out to be false, Yahoo’s investigation turned up the 2014 theft, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Analyst Robert Peck of SunTrust Robinson Humphrey said the breach probably was not enough to prompt Verizon to abandon its deal with Yahoo, but it could call for a price decrease of $100 million to $200 million, depending on how many users leave Yahoo.

Steven Caponi, an attorney at K&L Gates with a practice including merger litigation, said that Yahoo’s breach could fall under the “material adverse change” clause common in mergers allowing a buyer to walk away if its target’s value deteriorates.

“That would give Verizon the opportunity to renegotiate the terms or potentially walk away from the transaction if it is a material change. Whether it is a material change will depend in large part on what kind of information was compromised,” Caponi said.

Still, it is rare for mergers to fall apart over material changes. Verizon said in a statement it was made aware of the breach within the last two days and had limited information about the matter.

“We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests,” the company said.

Shares of Yahoo stock closed a penny higher at $44.15, while shares of Verizon, were up about 1 percent.

RISING ATTACKS

The Yahoo breach follows a rising number of other large-scale data attacks and could make it a watershed event that prompts government and businesses to put more effort into bolstering defenses, said Dan Kaminsky, a well-known internet security expert.

Retailers and health insurers have been especially hard hit after high-profile breaches at Home Depot Inc, Target Corp, Anthem Inc and Premera Blue Cross.

“Five hundred of the Fortune 500 have been hacked,” he said. “If anything has changed, it’s that these attacks are getting publicly disclosed.”

Three U.S. intelligence officials, who declined to be identified by name, said they believed the attack was state-sponsored because of its resemblance to previous hacks traced to Russian intelligence agencies or hackers acting at their direction.

Yahoo said it was working with law enforcement on the matter, and the FBI said it was investigating.

“The investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network,” the company said.

While the breach comprised mostly low-value information, it did include security questions and answers created by users themselves. That data could make users vulnerable if they use the same answers on other sites.

A former Yahoo employee said the Q&A were deliberately left unencrypted, which allowed Yahoo to catch fake accounts more easily because fake accounts tended to reuse questions and answers.

News of the massive breach at one of the nation’s largest email providers may fan concern that U.S. companies and government agencies are not doing enough to improve cyber security.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner said in a statement he was “most troubled by news that this breach occurred in 2014, and yet the public is only learning details of it today.”

Technology website Recode first reported Tuesday that Yahoo planned to disclose details about a data breach affecting hundreds of millions of users.

(Reporting by Aishwarya Venugopal in Bengaluru and Dustin Volz in Washington; additional reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston, Lauren Hirsch in New York, and Joseph Menn and Deborah Todd in San Francisco, writing by Alwyn Scott; editing by Peter Henderson and Cynthia Osterman)

FBI detects breaches against two state voter systems

By Jim Finkle and Dustin Volz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The FBI is urging U.S. election officials to increase computer security after it uncovered evidence that hackers have targeted two state election databases in recent weeks, according to a confidential advisory.

The warning was in an Aug. 18 flash alert from the FBI’s Cyber Division. Reuters obtained a copy of the document.

Yahoo News first reported the story Monday, citing unnamed law enforcement officials who said they believed foreign hackers caused the intrusions.

U.S. intelligence officials have become increasingly worried that hackers sponsored by Russia or other countries may attempt to disrupt the November presidential election.

Officials and cyber security experts say recent breaches at the Democratic National Committee and elsewhere in the Democratic Party were likely carried out by people within the Russian government. Kremlin officials have denied the allegations of Moscow’s involvement.

Concerns about election computer security prompted Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson to convene a conference call with state election officials earlier this month, when he offered the department’s help in making their voting systems more secure.

The FBI warning did not identify the two states targeted by cyber intruders, but Yahoo News said sources familiar with the document said it referred to Arizona and Illinois, whose voter registration systems were penetrated.

Citing a state election board official, Yahoo News said the Illinois voter registration system was shut down for 10 days in late July after hackers downloaded personal data on up to 200,000 voters.

The Arizona attack was more limited and involved introducing malicious software into the voter registration system, Yahoo News quoted a state official as saying. No data was removed in that attack, the official said.

(Writing by David Alexander; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn)

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