Category Archives: election hacking

Air gapping voting machines isn’t enough, says one election security expert

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The safeguards that election officials say protect voting machines from being hacked are not as effective as advertised, a leading election security expert says. U.S. elections, including national ones, are run by state and local offices. While that decentralization could serve an argument that elections are difficult to hack, University of Michigan Professor J. Alex Halderman says that it’s more like a double-edged sword. Speaking to an audience of students and faculty at the University of Maryland’s engineering school, Halderman said that the U.S. is unique in how elections are localized. States and counties choose the technology used to run federal elections. “Each state state running its own independent election system in many cases does provide a kind of defense. And that defense is that there is no single point nationally that you can try to attack or hack into in order to change the national results,” Halderman said. But […]

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Information sharing on election security is getting better, officials say

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Federal, state and local officials who oversee election infrastructure and security are optimistic about their ability to share information that’s needed to protect elections from malicious actors. At a Thursday panel hosted by the Center for Internet Security, individuals representing the Department of Homeland Security, state secretaries of state, and state election directors discussed the progress they’ve made on election security coordination since 2016. “The Department of Homeland security and the U.S. government are so involved in election security because starting in 2016, we really did assess that the threat of something happening to our elections was relatively high,” said Bob Kolasky, DHS’s acting undersecretary of the National Protection and Programs Directorate. “That does not mean that the risk to our elections systems has to be high.” When the U.S. intelligence community concluded in January 2017 that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, the DHS designated election systems as part of the country’s critical infrastructure. Kolasky acknowledged that […]

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Spooked by election hacking, states are moving to paper ballots

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Paper ballots may at first seem like an antiquated voting practice, but hacking fears are now pushing an increasing number of states toward a return to the basics. State legislatures and election directors are heeding warnings from Washington that hackers may tamper with electronic voting systems in the 2018 midterm elections. The U.S. intelligence community has said that Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a campaign to interfere with the 2016 presidential election and that the Kremlin will try to do so again. On the national level, lawmakers have made several attempts to push legislation aiming to strengthen election cybersecurity through grants to upgrade equipment and to increase cooperation between the federal government and lower jurisdictions. So far, no such legislation has passed either house in Congress. Amid all this national attention, a number of states have started to act on their own bolster the integrity of elections they run. With these […]

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What the Meuller/Russia Indictment Means for Cybersecurity

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On Feb. 16, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. returned an indictment against 13 Russian citizens and three Russian companies for a scheme involving information warfare against the political institutions of the United States. Does this portend a … Continue reading What the Meuller/Russia Indictment Means for Cybersecurity→

US Identifies 6 Russian Government Officials Involved In DNC Hack

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The United States Department of Justice has reportedly gathered enough evidence to charge at least six Russian government officials for allegedly playing a role in hacking DNC systems and leaking information during the 2016 presidential race.

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Experts Stress Better Election Security Following DefCon Report

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There has been a lot of rumor and speculation about the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the possibility that the results were manipulated or hacked in some way. While investigations continue and there is no hard evidence I am aware of that any succ… Continue reading Experts Stress Better Election Security Following DefCon Report→

U.S. voting machines are easily hackable, DEF CON report says

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A number of voting machines used in U.S. elections are easily hackable, a report from DEF CON, one of the world’s largest hacker conventions, found. The report is based on the Voting Village experiment at July’s DEF CON conference in Las Vegas. Over the course of four days, hackers were invited to explore and tinker with voting machines to expose their vulnerabilities. Hackers with physical access to the systems were able to compromise some of the machines within minutes. Over the course of the experiment, each of the two dozen machines was breached in some way, the report notes. The findings were presented by a panel of hackers and cybersecurity experts on an Atlantic Council panel on Tuesday, which included DEF CON founder Jeff Moss. “These machines were pretty easy to hack,” Moss said. “This flies in the face of the narrative that’s been spun by the manufacturers, which is […]

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DHS, FBI promise to improve defense of election systems ahead of 2018 campaign season

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The Department of Homeland Security is promising to better coordinate with state and local government officials in efforts to defend election systems from hackers in the upcoming 2018 congressional campaign season. The pledge, by acting Secretary Elaine Duke, comes after a chaotic 2016 cycle which saw hackers probe and in some cases breach voter registration databases in multiple states. There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that election results were significantly altered as a result of these intrusions. Duke spoke Wednesday on Capitol Hill alongside FBI Director Christopher Wray and Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in a congressional hearing focused on existing homeland security threats. At one point, lawmakers pressed Duke and Wray to answer how their individual agencies were preparing for possible cyberattacks against election systems in the coming year — especially those that could go further and potentially impact voting tallies. Duke highlighted the role DHS […]

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Proof It’s Possible to Hack German Elections; Hackers Tamper with Voting-Software

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Germany’s democracy is in danger, as the upcoming federal elections in the country, where nearly 61.5 million citizens are going to vote on September 24th, could be hijacked.

Hackers have disclosed how to hack the German voting software to tamper with votes and alter the outcome of an election.

Yes, election hacking is no theory—it is happening.

A team of researchers from German hacking

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