The U.S. agency overseeing elections has “quietly weakened a key element of proposed security standards…” reports the Associated Press, “raising concern among voting-integrity experts that many such systems will remain vulnerable to hacking.” The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) is poised to approve its first new security standards in 15 years after an arduous process involving multiple technical and elections community bodies…
Tag: Computer Security
Suspected Russian Hack Extends Far Beyond SolarWinds Software, Investigators Say
Investigators probing a massive hack of the U.S. government and businesses say they have found concrete evidence the suspected Russian espionage operation went far beyond the compromise of the small software vendor publicly linked to the attack. From a report: Close to a third of the victims didn’t run the SolarWinds software initially considered the main avenue of attack for the…
Foreign Hackers Cripple Texas County’s Email System, Raising Election Security Concerns
Last week, voters and election administrators who emailed Leanne Jackson, the clerk of rural Hamilton County in central Texas, received bureaucratic-looking replies. “Re: official precinct results,” one subject line read. The text supplied passwords for an attached file. But Jackson didn’t send the messages. From a report: Instead, they came from Sri Lankan and Congolese email addresses, and they cleverly hid…
Michael Hawley, Programmer, Professor and Pianist, Dies at 58
Michael Hawley, a computer programmer, professor, musician, speechwriter and impresario who helped lay the intellectual groundwork for what is now called the Internet of Things, died on Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 58. From a report: The cause was colon cancer, said his father, George Hawley. Mr. Hawley began his career as a video game programmer at…
Researchers Develop Faster Way To Replace Bad Data With Accurate Information
sandbagger writes: Researchers from North Carolina State University and the Army Research Office have demonstrated a new model of how competing pieces of information spread in online social networks and the Internet of Things (IoT). The findings could be used to disseminate accurate information more quickly, displacing false information about anything from computer security to public health. “Whether in the IoT…
Intel Fixes a Security Flaw It Said Was Repaired 6 Months Ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Last May, when Intel released a patch for a group of security vulnerabilities researchers had found in the company’s computer processors, Intel implied that all the problems were solved. But that wasn’t entirely true, according to Dutch researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who discovered the vulnerabilities and first reported them…
Edward Snowden: ‘Without Encryption, We Will Lose All Privacy. This is Our New Battleground’
Edward Snowden: In the midst of the greatest computer security crisis in history, the US government, along with the governments of the UK and Australia, is attempting to undermine the only method that currently exists for reliably protecting the world’s information: encryption. Should they succeed in their quest to undermine encryption, our public infrastructure and private lives will be rendered permanently…
‘Hard-To-Fix’ Cisco Flaw Puts Work Email At Risk
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Security researchers have discovered serious vulnerabilities affecting dozens of Cisco devices. The flaws allow hackers to deceive the part of the product hardware that checks whether software updates come from legitimate sources. Experts believe this could put emails sent within an organization at risk as they may use compromised routers. Messages sent…
More Than 23 Million People Use the Password ‘123456’
Bearhouse shares a new study from the UK’s “National Cyber Security Centre,” which advises the public on computer security, about the world’s most-frequently cracked passwords. It’s probably no surprise to the Slashdot readership: people use bad passwords. A recent study of publicly-available “hacked” accounts — by the UK National Cyber Security Centre — reveals “123456” was top, followed by the much…
Is Assange’s Arrest a Threat to the Free Press?
He deserves his fate, but it sets a dangerous precedent. Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/opinion/julian-assange-wikileaks-first-amendment.html?partner=rss&emc=rss…