Russian intelligence agents attempted to infiltrate at least one of the American voting software suppliers and sent a phishing email targeting more than 100 local elections officials days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to the report from the U.S. National Security Agency published by The Intercept.

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The document was anonymously provided to The Intercept on May 5. The report reveals that the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or, also known as the GRU, attempted to compromise election-related hardware and software, like private sector companies that make machines to control and verify voter rolls.

The NSA document said that Russian hackers tried to use data gathered on companies to phish local organizations and government officials. The first target of hackers, according to the report, is an unnamed U.S. election software company. The attack starts by sending emails, asking employees to confirm their account credentials, but doing so means that the account would be handed over the Russian hackers.

The GRU creates Gmail account, appeared to belong to a voting company. Then, hackers will be sending emails to local governments containing Microsoft Word document, which is only used to act as a front to hide malicious software. The malware will be installed on the computer of the victim when the document was opened. The attack presented "persistent access" to the computer to allow Russian hackers in spying the user's activity.

The attack believed to occur on October 31 until November 1, days just before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. About 122 email addresses were the target of the attack that linked to local government organizations.

The NSA does not give any conclusions whether the attack was successful or not, despite providing specific details on efforts of Russian hackers in attacking U.S. election systems. Furthermore, the agency said it is "unknown" whether the Russian attack affects the result of the presidential election.