US offers $10M in reward for info on cyberattacks targeting elections

Washington: With less than four months to go until the presidential 2020 election, the US has decided to offer a $10 million bounty to anyone who can find foreign hackers trying to meddle in the election.

The State Department on Wednesday announced its Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program is offering bounties on any information that could lead to the identification or location of: "any person who works with or for a foreign government for the purpose of interfering with US elections through certain illegal cyber activities."

Specifically the reward applies to foreign hackers who are found to be in violation of Section 1030, title 18 of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which essentially criminalizes hackers gaining unauthorized access to computers.

The State Department said it will pay out bounties of up to $10 million, but gave no details on how pricing would be pegged to quality of information.

ZDNet reports this is the third reward offered by the RFJ for foreign hackers this year: In April it offered a $5 million reward for information on North Korean government hackers, and in July it offered two bounties of $1 million apiece on two specific Ukrainian hackers.

Hacking from foreign nations became a huge issue during the 2016 election after Russian hackers stole and leaked emails and documents from Hillary Clinton's campaign. Russian state-backed efforts to interfere in the 2020 election were detected in February, and in June Google caught China and Iran-backed hackers trying to compromise the Trump and Biden campaigns.