Collaborate Disseminate
The Georgia governor hopeful is attacking the run-of-the-mill security research that keeps the internet safe. Continue reading Brian Kemp Is Weaponizing Good Cybersecurity in an Authoritarian Ploy Against Democrats
A federal judge on Monday denied a request by Georgia voters to have the state refrain from using its paperless voting machines for the midterm elections and use paper ballots statewide. Plaintiffs in the ongoing case had asked for a preliminary injunction on the the use of direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines out of concern that they are easy to hack, since they do not produce a verifiable paper record for each vote. Judge Amy Totenberg of the Northern District of Georgia said in her 46-page opinion that the burden of implementing an entirely different voting system across the state in the few weeks before Election Day outweighed the immediate security concerns associated with DREs. Totenberg nonetheless criticized the state for letting it get to this point. The judge said that the defendants “have delayed in grappling with the heightened critical cybersecurity issues of our era posed for the State’s […]
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Continue reading Judge upholds paperless voting in Georgia, but pressures for change
The voting machines used in the latest Georgia primary are the subject of a lawsuit that calls for the state to stop using them out of fear that they can be hacked. A group of election reform advocates is seeking an injunction that would force the state to abandon its paperless direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines before November. For Georgia, that would mean all of the machines, since it’s one of five states that exclusively use DREs. Experts have argued that DRE machines are susceptible to hacking because of their lack of an accompanying paper record. Plantiffs contend that the Georgia voters’ constitutional right to properly counted votes is in jeopardy due to the inherent flaws in DRE machines. Instead of relying on the machines in November, the suit reasons that voters could simply use paper ballots then count the votes using optical scanners the state currently uses to count mail-in and provisional […]
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Continue reading Lawsuit pushes Georgia to dump paperless voting machines by November
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has concluded that the department did not breach Georgia’s voting system, according to a letter issued to Congress on Monday. The letter by Inspector General John Roth stipulates that his office’s Digital Forensics and Analysis Unit recreated a contractor’s actions from Nov. 15, 2016: accessing a public page on the Georgia Secretary of State’s website in order to verify security guards’ weapons certification licensing, which a contractor then copied into a spreadsheet file. The letter was sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which asked for an independent investigation in January. The incident came to light last December, when Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp claimed someone from DHS tried to breach his office’s firewall after the state’s third-party cybersecurity provider detected an IP address from the federal department’s Southwest D.C. office trying to penetrate the state’s firewall. Since then, the […]
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Continue reading DHS inspector general: Georgia’s election systems weren’t hacked