phalse phace shares a report from NPR: Christopher Krebs, the Department of Homeland Security director who had spearheaded a campaign to counter rumors about voter fraud, has been fired, President Trump tweeted on Tuesday. Trump, in two misleading tweets about the security of the U.S. election, said Krebs’ termination was “effective immediately.” The CISA campaign, led by Krebs, was originally intended…
Tag: election security
Facebook Critics Take on Its Oversight Board
A group of high-profile Facebook critics on Friday announced the launch of what they are calling the “Real Facebook Oversight Board,” an effort that aims to counter an independent board established by Facebook last year to oversee its decisions on content moderation. From a report: The opposing effort represents how political the fight between Facebook and its critics has become in…
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…
Some States Have Embraced Online Voting. It’s a Huge Risk.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: On Sunday, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan revealed numerous security flaws in the product that West Virginia and Delaware are using, saying it “represents a severe risk to election security and could allow attackers to alter election results without detection.” In fact, it may be a…
2018 ‘Hacking Attempt’ Claimed By Georgia Was A Security Test They’d Requested Themselves
An anonymous reader quotes the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
It was a stunning accusation: Two days before the 2018 election for Georgia governor, Republican Brian Kemp used his power as secretary of state to open an investigation into what he called a “failed hacking attempt” of voter registration systems involving the Democratic Party. But newly released case files from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation…
The Atlantic Warns About 2020 Election Security Holes and Possible Russian Interference
Slashdot reader DevNull127 writes: A staff writer at The Atlantic published a 7,800-word warning about election security considering the possibility of everything from ransomware to meddling with voter-registration databases — and of course, online disinformation. But it starts with Jack Cable, a Stanford student who discovered security holes in Chicago’s Board of Elections website — then spent months trying to find…
Leaked Russian Interference Report Raises Questions About Brexit, UK Election Security
A report from the U.K. Parliament’s intelligence committee concludes that “Russian interference may have had an impact on the Brexit referendum,” reports the Times of London, adding that “the effect was ‘unquantifiable.'” The Associated Press reports:
The committee said British intelligence services failed to devote enough resources to counter the threat and highlighted the impact of articles posted by Russian new sites…
Critical US Election Systems Have Been Left Exposed Online
Jason Koebler shares a report from Motherboard: For years, U.S. election officials and voting machine vendors have insisted that critical election systems are never connected to the internet and therefore can’t be hacked. But a group of election security experts have found what they believe to be nearly three dozen backend election systems in 10 states connected to the internet over…
Microsoft Warns of Political Cyberattacks, Announces Free Vote-Verification Software
“Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines,” reports NBC News. Microsoft also said its AccountGuard service has already spotted 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations — 95% of which were located in the U.S. The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called…