Marco Rubio said that Russian hackers infiltrated the Florida County elections

Florida senator Marco Rubio said in an article published Friday in The New York Times that Russian hackers have infiltrated Florida's county-level electoral systems in 2016.

Rubio detailed the attack on the Times, which included malicious viruses sent by the GRU, a Russian military intelligence unit, to government officials tasked with managing the 2016 county elections.

Although the hackers "are able" to change the voters list data, Rubio said that they did not seem to do it.

The Republican senator's remarks come after the special council report Robert Mueller said the FBI was convinced that the GRU had managed to gain access to the "network of at least one Florida county government."

Florida has been at the center of Russia's hacking concerns for years, but Mueller's report has deepened official conclusions about hacking. The Tampa Bay Times announced last week that the agency would meet with state officials a few weeks after the hacking report.

This is the latest development in the state's concerns about hacking since tensions mounted during the race in mid-November in November.

Read moreA Democratic senator in a close re-election race said the Russians were ingesting him in his election campaign – but some senior officials said they did not know what he was talking about

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson raised concerns in August 2018 when he said, without providing any evidence, that the Russians had entered the voting systems of the states and that they were ingesting them in the polls. State campaigns in 2018.

After the incumbent was pressed and presented no evidence, Senator Rick Scott, then Nelson's challenger, publicly implied that he had invented the request.

Rubio's recent comment contradicts Scott's arguments against Nelson's claims and confirms his earlier warnings that state systems should be wary of hackers likely to easily manipulate voter data.

"If anyone tells you that Florida or any other state in the country is willing to handle that, I do not think that's the case," Rubio said. "It almost looks like what they did in 2016 is to probe these problems in the future because … they wanted to wreak havoc around the world."