Watch The Guardian. Jon Swain of The Guardian tweeted this

and The Guardian has got this up so far as the top U.S. site story:

Russian agents hacked US voting system manufacturer before US election – report

Monday 5 June 2017 18.47 EDT, by David Smith in Washington and Jon Swaine in NY

• Federal contractor arrested and charged with removing classified material
• NSA report: cyber-attack on software supplier and phishing emails hit officials

"Reality Winner" is trending on Twitter but so far it is  mostlyTrump-supporting trolls attacking her with various conspiracy theories as related to the Obama admin... 

Re: Success?

Remains to be figured out: at what?

NYTimes report by Charlie Savage points out that this incident could only have to do with jurisdictions in California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia, as that is where the company's products are used. In addition, the company has stated that "none of its products dealt with vote marking or tabulation."

The report masked the name of the software vendor, referring to it as “U.S. Company 1,” in keeping with standard minimization rules for intelligence reports based on surveillance. However, the report contained references to an electronic voter identification system used by poll workers and sold by VR Systems, a Florida company.

VR Systems’ website said its products were used by jurisdictions in California, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. In a statement, VR acknowledged that there had been a problem, while stressing that none of its products dealt with vote marking or tabulation.

“When a customer alerted us to an obviously fraudulent email purporting to come from VR Systems, we immediately notified all our customers and advised them not to click on the attachment,” it said. “We are only aware of a handful of our customers who actually received the fraudulent email and of those, we have no indication that any of them clicked on the attachment or were compromised as a result.”

I find Savage's description of the hack to be much easier to understand than The Intercept's, maybe others will too:

Both attacks described in the report relied on so-called spear phishing, a tactic that uses spoof emails to trick users into clicking links or opening attachments that then install malicious software on their computers. The G.R.U. sent the emails from two free American web-based email providers, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook.com, it said.

The first attack, on Aug. 24, involved an attack on an American company “evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions.”

That attack was most likely successful. The report said the G.R.U. used data most likely obtained from it to conduct the second set of attacks, a “voter registration themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.”

Specifically, it said, in late October or early November, the G.R.U. sent to 122 local elections officials emails designed to look like they were from that company and containing attachments designed to look like an updated system manual and checklist. Opening the attachment would download malicious software from a remote server, the report said.

So the first was to get  info on the systems. in order to make up plausible-sounding fishing emails used in the second.

This article may confirm opinions for those predisposed to dislike anything from The Intercept. I believe they have done a lot of valuable reporting but appear to have fucked up royally in this case. The result is that an apparently naively principled Hillary-supporting young woman, maybe pumped up with the idea of doing something heroic, will no doubt pay a big price for a long time for sloppily leaking what is apparently nothing-news. I hope she doesn’t get the Manning treatment but I expect that it will somehow be played to make a scary example of her to warn off other potential leakers. It will be interesting to see if The Intercept feels the need to defend their actions in this case and how they do so.  

 On the other hand, this analysis may be totally rejected [and maybe the story will play out to show that it should be] because the source was rejected years ago, or for any number of other reasons, especially if it contradicts or alternatively fails to confirm a bias.  Regardless, I think it worth a read to anyone following this news.