Jeanette Manfra, acting deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity at DHS, said that the department has "evidence of election-related systems in 21 states that were targeted".
Johnson also said during his testimony that the Democratic National Committee refused the Department of Homeland Security's attempts to help them with security precautions, after hackers obtained and released DNC emails last July.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson says cyberattacks orchestrated by the Russian government did not alter any ballots, ballot counts or the reporting of election results. On the same day, the explicit "Access Hollywood" tape of Donald Trump took over the headlines, knocking the Russian news "below the fold", as Johnson put it.
"I pressed my staff to know whether DHS was sufficiently proactive, and on the scene helping the DNC identify the intruders and patch vulnerabilities", Johnson said in a written statement submitted to the House committee ahead of his testimony.
Former Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson outlined how Russian interference in the election did not affect voting machine tallies, but could have affected the election in other ways, during a House Intelligence Committee hearing on June 21 at the Capitol.
Johnson's designation of USA election systems as critical infrastructure was aimed at providing more federal cybersecurity assistance to state and local governments to keep voting safe from tampering.
US elections are decentralized, with each of the 50 states and thousands of local governments overseeing their own voter registrations, and ballots are cast and counted locally.
"I believe the Russians absolutely will continue to try to conduct influence operations in the US, which will include cyber operations", said Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.
Johnson said their concerns suggested a "profound misunderstanding" of what the designation would mean, which he said he tried to clarify.
She added that the hacks did not deal with altering the electoral vote count.
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Constand's allegations are the only ones to result in criminal charges, with numerous others too old to allow for prosecution. If a hung jury is declared, the district attorney will have to decide whether to go forward with re-trying the case.
It wasn't until January that the intelligence community felt comfortable attributing the scanning and probing of state voter-registration databases to Russian Federation, several of which he said were successful.
The top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, asked Johnson if former FBI Director Jim Comey would have opened such an inquiry without an evidence for doing so.
Clinton has blamed the disclosure of the emails on a daily basis as one reason for her stunning upset loss to Trump, although Johnson said he had no idea about their importance in analyzing the outcome.
But they were unequivocal on one point: Americans should have no doubt that Russian Federation meddled in the election.
Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the officials said none of the digital intrusions affected the parts of electoral systems that counted votes - but that they expect Russian Federation to keep trying.
"I know America's voting systems are vulnerable because my colleagues and I have hacked them", he told the Senate committee. "That said, these reported attempts to penetrate our elections systems are an urgent reminder of the need to get more cybersecurity expertise and resources into the hands of state and local officials".
Federal and state officials insist that no votes were changed by Russian cyberattacks in 2016, but Halderman said that would remain a real possibility unless the nation took a series of steps to update its security.
Wednesday morning, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, a Dept.
The question of the breadth and depth of Russian penetration in election systems has alarmed local and federal officials.
A sinister portrait of Russia's cyberattacks on the US emerged Wednesday as current and former USA officials told Congress Moscow stockpiled stolen information and selectively disseminated it during the 2016 presidential campaign to undermine the American political process.
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