Category Archives: election security

How Twitter, Facebook say they will treat premature claims of electoral victory

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With less than 24 hours before Election Day in the United States, social media platforms were still announcing plans about how they intend to flag premature and unfounded claims of victory in the event that a candidate tries to seize on a moment of global anxiety for their own gain. While Twitter previously said it would flag misleading claims about election results, the company on Monday clarified the criteria on which it will base its decisions. President Trump has told several close associates that he plans to declare victory on election night if he looks like he’s “ahead,” regardless of the official tally, according to Axios. Twitter, meanwhile, has made it clear that it will consider such claims premature if they come before at least two outlets from a pool including ABC News, the Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Decision Desk HQ, Fox News, and NBC News publicly share their projections or election results. Twitter has also said […]

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Iranian hackers probed election-related websites in 10 states, US officials say

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Suspected Iranian hackers have probed the election-related websites of 10 states and, in one case, accessed voter registration data, federal personnel told election security officials on Friday. The hackers were conducting broad scanning of state and local websites at the end of September, then attempted to exploit the websites and nab voter data, officials from the FBI and Department of Homeland Security said during a phone briefing. They successfully compromised one database, according to Jermaine Roebuck, an official at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “We have confirmed that in at least one state the threat actor did obtain [access] to a voter registration database by abusing a website misconfiguration,” he said. “We are aware of the specific states that were targeted in this activity and we’re actively coordinating with those states currently to ensure proper remediation.” The suspected Iranian hackers have been attempting to exploit known software vulnerabilities in their search for voter data, federal […]

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Wisc. GOP’s $2.3M MAGA Hat Debacle Showcases Fraud Concerns

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Scammers bilked Wisconsin Republicans out of $2.3 million in a basic BEC scam — and anyone working on the upcoming election needs to pay attention.    Continue reading Wisc. GOP’s $2.3M MAGA Hat Debacle Showcases Fraud Concerns→

Wisc. GOP’s $2.3M MAGA Hat Debacle Showcases Fraud Concerns

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Scammers bilked Wisconsin Republicans out of $2.3 million in a basic BEC scam — and anyone working on the upcoming election needs to pay attention.    Continue reading Wisc. GOP’s $2.3M MAGA Hat Debacle Showcases Fraud Concerns→

Halloween News Wrap: The Election, Hospital Deaths and Other Scary Cyberattack Stories

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Threatpost breaks down the scariest stories of the week ended Oct. 30 haunting the security industry — including bugs that just won’t die. Continue reading Halloween News Wrap: The Election, Hospital Deaths and Other Scary Cyberattack Stories→

Don’t let election-themed misinformation fool you. Here’s what to watch out for.

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Whether it’s Russian trolls or verified Twitter accounts spreading disinformation during the current political moment almost is besides the point. Four years after Russian operatives aimed to influence the 2016 election in favor of President Donald Trump by spreading lies on social media, a large range of groups, lawmakers and influential political voices have been amplifying false claims in to boost their own political goals ahead of the 2020 elections. U.S. voters are bombarded with misinformation prior to Election Day in the form of social media posts, text messages, robocalls and tweets from President Trump and his campaign staffers. There’s also been threatening emails traced to Iran, and recent reports of how a Russian agent sought to sway political opinion in the U.S. While many could feel a sense of whiplash from the onslaught of manufactured narratives, academics and social scientists are advising Americans to be careful, and fact-check claims about the election, voting processes, and any political candidate, particularly if the allegations […]

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Election Security: How Mobile Devices Are Shaping the Way We Work, Play and Vote

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With the election just a week away, cybercriminals are ramping up mobile attacks on citizens under the guise of campaign communications. Continue reading Election Security: How Mobile Devices Are Shaping the Way We Work, Play and Vote→

CISA chief rips IG report, touts election security efforts

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The head of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has slammed a new inspector general report criticizing some of the agency’s election security work, calling the investigation “poorly timed” and its conclusions misleading. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general credited CISA for making progress in helping election officials mitigate cyberthreats, but also concluded the agency hadn’t invested enough resources in countering physical threats to election infrastructure. CISA officials say they’ve accounted for those threats in their preparation. Multiple federal agencies, including the FBI, also are working with state officials to guard against cyber and physical threats to the election. “While the OIG [office of the inspector general] recognizes our extensive coordination effort, releasing this report before Election Day fails to account for CISA’s actions throughout the entirety of the actual 2020 election cycle,” CISA Director Chris Krebs said in a statement. “While we can certainly update plans, use […]

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The lowly DDoS attack is still a viable threat for undermining elections

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Scenes like what happened to Florida’s voter registration site on Oct. 6 has played out over and over again: A system goes down, and questions fly. Was there a cyberattack, specifically a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack meant to overwhelm a website site with traffic, knocking it offline? Could there have been too many legitimate visitors rushing to the site to beat the voter registration deadline — that surged past what the system could handle? Or, was it something weirder, as in this case, like pop singer Ariana Grande urging fans on Twitter to register to vote? Florida’s chief information officer eventually blamed misconfigured computer servers. The incident, though, was one of several over the course of the past month that exposed ongoing anxieties about how cyberattacks, accidental outages and other technical failures could upend a polling place, or even an election. Few, if any, election security experts would rank the […]

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