2016 Election Results Hacked? President Obama Orders Full Review On Hacking

Following an election season plagued with doubts cast on the democratic process, President Barack Obama has ordered a full review of any hacking-related activity that took place during the 2016 Presidential election, according to a report from Politico.

The order comes just over a month after the election completed, though recounts are ongoing in some states following a challenge to the results from Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

A full report into possible hacks is expected to be completed before President Obama leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017.

“We may have crossed into a new threshold and it is incumbent upon us to take stock of that, to review, to conduct some after-action, to understand what has happened and to impart some lessons learned," Obama counterterrorism and homeland security adviser Lisa Monaco told reporters at an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Monaco reportedly would not guarantee the findings of the report would be made public, but did say the information would be shared with “a range of stakeholders” including members of Congress.

Hacking became a major topic of discussion during the 2016 election cycle, as emails from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta were stolen and released to the public via Wikileaks.

United States intelligence organizations fingered Russia as the culprit behind the hacks, though the Kremlin and WikiLeaks head Julian Assange have denied the Russian government’s involvement.

The FBI noted there were several attempts to infiltrate voter registration sites during the election. The potential hacks were recorded in more than a dozen states, and officials suspected Russia was responsible.

Last month, several members of the Senate Intelligence Committee called for President Obama to declassify and make public information on Russia’s attempted interference into the U.S. election.

The recount effort launched by Stein, which has been halted in Michigan and challenged in Pennsylvania but continues in Wisconsin, was spurred on by computer security experts who reported potential irregularities in the vote totals of the three swing states. The challenge raised more concern about the possibility of state-sponsored actors attempting to undermine the election.

Prior to the election IBTimes spoke with security experts about the potential of an Election Day hack. While rigging the election nationally would be difficult, they said there was much more room for hacking on the state levels where systems are out of date and rarely tested for digital security.