In Boston: Election-Hacking War Game Bypasses Election Systems (securityledger.com) 43
Slashdot reader Actually, I do RTFA remains wary of a new "blockchain-powered mobile voting app" being used by the state of West Virginia to collect ballots from overseas absentee voters.
But meanwhile, Slashdot reader chicksdaddy notes an election hacking exercise conducted with city employees and local FBI officers in Boston focused on attempts to disrupt a hypothetical election in "Nolandia" by simply clogging highways and sowing chaos. From Security Ledger: The day started with snarled traffic and a suspicious outage of the 9-1-1 emergency call center that has put the public and first responders on edge. Already, the city's police force was taxed keeping tabs on protests tied to a meeting of the International Monetary Fund. By afternoon, the federal Emergency Alert System (EAS) was warning Nolandia residents of massive natural gas leaks in neighborhoods in the north and west part of the city, prompting officials to order evacuations of the affected areas.
Later, bomb threats called in to local television stations shut down a bridge linking the northern and southern halves of the city -- a major artery for vehicles. The EAS warning turns out to have been false -- no gas leaks are detected, nor is any bomb found on the bridge. Later in the day, cyber attack s on a smart traffic light deployment in Nolandia snarl traffic further and sow chaos during the evening commute... This is election hacking 2018 style: a highly successful operation in which no voting machines or voting infrastructure were compromised, attacked or even targeted.
The cybersecurity company that created the exercise said they "wanted to expand that scope and demonstrate that the threat landscape is actually much broader...."
But meanwhile, Slashdot reader chicksdaddy notes an election hacking exercise conducted with city employees and local FBI officers in Boston focused on attempts to disrupt a hypothetical election in "Nolandia" by simply clogging highways and sowing chaos. From Security Ledger: The day started with snarled traffic and a suspicious outage of the 9-1-1 emergency call center that has put the public and first responders on edge. Already, the city's police force was taxed keeping tabs on protests tied to a meeting of the International Monetary Fund. By afternoon, the federal Emergency Alert System (EAS) was warning Nolandia residents of massive natural gas leaks in neighborhoods in the north and west part of the city, prompting officials to order evacuations of the affected areas.
Later, bomb threats called in to local television stations shut down a bridge linking the northern and southern halves of the city -- a major artery for vehicles. The EAS warning turns out to have been false -- no gas leaks are detected, nor is any bomb found on the bridge. Later in the day, cyber attack s on a smart traffic light deployment in Nolandia snarl traffic further and sow chaos during the evening commute... This is election hacking 2018 style: a highly successful operation in which no voting machines or voting infrastructure were compromised, attacked or even targeted.
The cybersecurity company that created the exercise said they "wanted to expand that scope and demonstrate that the threat landscape is actually much broader...."
That isn't election hacking (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:That isn't election hacking (Score:4, Insightful)
We have proof otherwise. A significant number of people wouldn't care if an election was hacked as long as the other side lost.
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It's okay as long as we're the only ones doing it...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0... [nytimes.com]
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Any real government would reschedule the election in this scenario.
Do you mean like how the 2000 Florida vote was redone because off the clearly defective ballots?
Can you provide an example of an American election ever being redone because of weather, or traffic conditions?
Also, what is a "real" government?
No, an American government wouldn't (Score:2)
Common sense is all but dead in American governments and whatever idiot excuses are floated will have half the voters strongly supporting it and spend years resenting if the "other side" forces them to act sensibly.
Especially if a republican victory could be over turned; they don't care about anything they profess to anymore it's 100% pure tribal bullshit. I'm not saying the other side is perfect; sadly, I have to always point that out because Americans also have an inability to hold complex thoughts.
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When an election is so close that such minor tampering changes the outcome, it doesn't really matter who wins.
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I wish people would quit tossing out "common sense" as if it's at all common. People disagree. People have different cultures. People have different opinions. There is no such thing as common sense.
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Perhaps, but the thing that passes for a government in the U.S. would probably just let the Supreme Court pick a winner.
No provision for that in the US Constitution (Score:2)
Which means that Federal results would be almost impossible to correct with a new election
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Except for the US. For federal elections much of these elections have dates that can't move. There's one and only one shot. For congress the states would have to appoint temporary positions. For president, as we've seen in the past there's a long drawn out arm-wrestling tournament between the lawyers and eventually the Supreme Count make a mistake and steps into the mess. A re-do is a perfectly good idea, only you'd have to change a lot of laws to allow that.
Or if election results are important (Score:2)
you would research and target accordingly. Create traffic bottlenecks, attack the networks in the area, call in bomb threats to polling stations in districts that mattered.
On the other hand, major metropolitan areas are = more (numerically) meaningful in state/national elections than small localities.
If altering results of local elections are their aim, then it's probably pretty simple...
The media has been "hacking" elections forever (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes little difference whether the "hacking" is done on social media by extra-national agents being paid for their efforts, or by proprietors setting an editorial policy that advocates some themes and disparages others. People criticise FAKE NEWS and social media for feeding people articles they are predisposed to agree with. Which is exactly what the media does. We watch a particular channel's news broadcasts because we think it accurately represents reality. Or we read a particular newspaper because we think it is unbiased - which just means we are in accord with its politics.
You can even see articles that dissuade people from voting by suggesting that their party is comfortably ahead, so there's no need to go out in the rain. Or that one candidate or another did a bad thing and is therefore undeserving of support. All of this is manipulation. It is no different to "hack" the voters as it is to hack the voting machines. The outcome is the same.
That one is done in plain sight and the other is performed surreptitiously only reinforces the view that if the crime is big enough, it is excused.
Seems like an easy one to resolve (Score:3)
don't have everyone vote on the same day. simply have each county, or each alphabetically-prefixed last name vote on a different day over a period of a month.
We already have advanced voting. Simply make that the norm.
Done.
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Or just do what Oregon has done, and use mail-in ballots for everyone.
In California, voting by mail is optional, but about 70% of voters do so.
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Umm, I don't think that mailboxes are particularly difficult to defeat. A cup of coffee can do it.
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You'd need a lot of Starbucks to throw most elections.
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Mail in ballots are great. Makes it easy to verify that my family, employees and congregation are voting the correct way, plus my son, the mailman can also make sure those mail in ballots from the wrong type of people get lost.
None of that bullshit about secret ballots or just having to show up at the polling place and vote.
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How many congregations do you suppose it would take to throw an election? Sorry, but while this could happen, it's much less of a threat than other nation states odds of hacking electronic votes.
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Pen and paper, with the whole process watched seems the safest. There's still problems from non-independent groups choosing the election districts to banning/making harder for certain groups to vote, not to mention combining a bunch of elections into one to make it more complex and harder for new parties to appear at lower levels.
Election officials relying on blockchain? (Score:2)
Oy. Never hand an ignoramus a golden hammer.
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A foundational requirement of secret ballots is that a voter cannot disclose their vote to someone else.
This is very insightful and true. But there's another distortion risked by staggered voting days. Later voters would have the advantage of knowing early votes. This could skew turnout in close elections. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2... [jstor.org]
Imagine later-day districts happen to be more Republican. Close elections would spur Republicans to vote who would otherwise have abstained. Democrat abstainers in early-day districts would have missed this spur because they had less information that the election was going t
Another example of an indirect attack (Score:4, Interesting)
The scope and detail of the attack, not to mention its sheer audacity, had earned the grudging respect of the secretary. Years of worry about a possible Chinese "Assassin's Mace" -- a silver bullet super-weapon capable of disabling key parts of the American military -- turned out to be focused on the wrong thing. The cyber attacks varied. Sailors stationed at the 7th Fleet' s homeport in Japan awoke one day to find their financial accounts, and those of their dependents, empty. Checking, savings, retirement funds: simply gone. The Marines based on Okinawa were under virtual siege by the populace, whose simmering resentment at their presence had boiled over after a YouTube video posted under the account of a Marine stationed there had gone viral. The video featured a dozen Marines drunkenly gang-raping two teenaged Okinawan girls. The video was vivid, the girls' cries heart-wrenching the cheers of Marines sickening And all of it fake. The National Security Agency's initial analysis of the video had uncovered digital fingerprints showing that it was a computer-assisted lie, and could prove that the Marine's account under which it had been posted was hacked. But the damage had been done. There was the commanding officer of Edwards Air Force Base whose Internet browser history had been posted on the squadron's Facebook page. His command turned on him as a pervert; his weak protestations that he had not visited most of the posted links could not counter his admission that he had, in fact, trafficked some of them. Lies mixed with the truth. Soldiers at Fort Sill were at each other's throats thanks to a series of text messages that allegedly unearthed an adultery ring on base. The variations elsewhere were endless. Marines suddenly owed hundreds of thousands of dollars on credit lines they had never opened; sailors received death threats on their Twitter feeds; spouses and female service members had private pictures of themselves plastered across the Internet; older service members received notifications about cancerous conditions discovered in their latest physical. Leadership was not exempt. Under the hashtag # PACOMMUSTGO a dozen women allegedly described harassment by the commander of Pacific command. Editorial writers demanded that, under the administration's "zero tolerance" policy, he step aside while Congress held hearings. There was not an American service member or dependent whose life had not been digitally turned upside down. In response, the secretary had declared "an operational pause," directing units to stand down until things were sorted out. Then, China had made its move, flooding the South China Sea with its conventional forces, enforcing a sea and air identification zone there, and blockading Taiwan. But the secretary could only respond weakly with a few air patrols and diversions of ships already at sea. Word was coming in through back channels that the Taiwanese government, suddenly stripped of its most ardent defender, was already considering capitulation.
Fascinating story (Score:2)
Thank you
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Absolutely chilling. Underscores how badly we need networks we can trust. And news we can trust. And governments we can trust.