It’s official: US election systems designated as critical

On Friday, US Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson designated election systems to be part of the nation's critical US infrastructure. He said this move would better protect elections from increasingly sophisticated hacking.

"Now more than ever, it is important that we offer our assistance to state and local election officials in the cybersecurity of their systems," Johnson wrote in a statement published late Friday afternoon. "Election infrastructure is vital to our national interests, and cyber attacks on this country are becoming more sophisticated, and bad cyber actors—ranging from nation states, cyber criminals and hacktivists—are becoming more sophisticated and dangerous."

The designation came the same day that US intelligence officials published an unclassified version of a report concluding that Russian Federation president Vladimir Putin directly ordered intelligence agencies to collect data from the Democratic National Committee, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, and other organizations. The agencies then oversaw an effort to discredit Clinton, the Democratic party, and the US democratic political process through “information operations," according to the report, which was jointly written by the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the FBI.

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