Florida’s driver’s licenses are allegedly at the mercy of hackers while the Seminole County Supervisor of Elections page is showing Japanese characters on Google search, in an unwelcome post-Labor Day double play exposing major tech security concerns.
Per Dark Web Informer and other sites, the black-hat hackers at ShinyHunters have obtained a trove of driver’s licenses, which one theory holds were secured as part of the mammoth Nexus hack and dark web sale of 153 million driver’s licenses nationwide.
One license displayed as part of the database is not current: that of dead Palm Beach sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. So the database may or may not be current.
The extortion group SLSH is also circulating the data set, according to another source.
The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles did not answer the phone or respond to emails from Florida Politics Tuesday morning asking what data was hacked, whether it was current or legacy, or what protections will be given to drivers whose data was exposed.
The Department has until Friday to contact the hacker, or the “files,” including those of Epstein and other past and present Florida motorists, could be released.
Beyond sensitive data being brokered on the dark web, the Seminole County Supervisor of Elections attributes Japanese writing on the first page of Google search results connected to the office to “updates on the website.”
Office employee Jennifer Carroll said the office is “going to fix it.”
It is uncertain how quickly it will be resolved. Reindexing can take days or even weeks.
The actual spokesperson for the office, D’Anne Mica, said voters need not be concerned even though search results appear to be about Japanese flutes.
She could not say why the search engine language and content would be changed by routine updates. She was primarily concerned not by the problem in Google search results, but by the inclusion of her office’s tech snafu in the same story as the driver’s license hack.
She stressed that all voter data is secure.
Florida Politics also reached out to Secretary of State Cord Byrd Tuesday morning for more detail about the Seminole issue. He is asking his cybersecurity team what happened.
Questions abound, including about the election office’s slow response, which may not comply with cybersecurity best practices or with state law.
Google’s own AI suggests it was no accident, saying the anomaly is “almost certainly the result of a cyberattack known as the ‘Japanese keyword hack’ (or Japanese SEO spam) targeting the Florida election supervisor’s website.”
“Hackers found a vulnerability in the content management system (like WordPress or Drupal) used by that specific county’s Supervisor of Elections website. Once inside, they inject malicious code that generates thousands of fake, spammy web pages filled with Japanese text and links to e-commerce stores. The ‘flutes’ you see are just whatever random product the spam network is currently trying to promote or sell counterfeit versions of.”
The “cloaking” masks the pages from public view but lets Google index them, hijacking the government site’s authority to boost placements for e-commerce products.
The incident would seem to be covered under Section 282.3185 of the Florida Statutes, known as the Local Government Cybersecurity Act. It requires local governments to report Level 3, 4, or 5 cybersecurity incidents to the state’s Cybersecurity Operations Center, the Cybercrime Office of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and the local sheriff within 48 hours of discovery, and ransomware incidents within 12 hours. The Cybersecurity Operations Center then notifies legislative leadership. Reporting Level 1 and 2 incidents is optional.
Reports must include a summary of the incident, the date of the most recent data backup, the types of data compromised, the estimated fiscal impact, details of any ransom demanded, and a statement “requesting or declining assistance from the Cybersecurity Operations Center, the Cybercrime Office of the Department of Law Enforcement, or the sheriff who has jurisdiction over the local government.”
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Janelle Irwin Taylor contributed reporting.
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