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Government Politics

The Atlantic Warns About 2020 Election Security Holes and Possible Russian Interference (theatlantic.com) 250

Posted by EditorDavid from the tracking-trolls dept.
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 an official who'd fix them. The Atlantic describes the holes as "the most basic lapses in cybersecurity — preventable with code learned in an introductory computer-science class — and they remained even though similar gaps had been identified by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, not to mention widely reported in the media." And then this "teenager in a dorm room" discovered "many other" states had similar security holes...

Fortunately, the former head of security at Facebook (who now teaches at Stanford) had gotten approval from the Department of Homeland Security to assemble a team of undergraduates to search for election-security holes. "Less than six months before Election Day, the government will attempt to identify democracy's most glaring weakness by deploying college kids on their summer break." But there's other equally disturbing anecdotes in the article. On election night in 2016, Russians had queued up a Twitter campaign alleging voting irregularities, and "Russian diplomats were ready to publicly denounce the results as illegitimate..."

And yet there's also this anecdote about the Internet Research Agency, "a troll farm serving the interests of the Kremlin."

Starting in 2017, it launched a sustained effort to exaggerate the specter of its interference, a tactic that social-media companies call "perception hacking." Its trolls were instructed to post about the Mueller report and fan the flames of public anger over the blatant interference it revealed... If enough Americans come to believe that Russia can do whatever it wants to our democratic processes without consequence, that, too, increases cynicism about American democracy, and thereby serves Russian ends.
The article notes that some techniques are apparently borrowed from mainstream cybercriminals, and "In the cybercrime world, you're starting to see audio phishes," warns Microsoft's Corporate VP of Security and Trust. "[S]omebody gets a voicemail message from their boss, for example, saying, 'Hey, I need you to transfer this money to the following account right away.' It sounds just like your boss and so you do it."

What's really remarkable is the reach of the activities. The Alliance for Securing Democracy, which tracks illicit campaign financing, "has identified at least 60 instances of Russia financing political campaigns beyond its borders," according to the article. And sometimes the efforts actually go offline... What the Russians can't obtain from afar, they will attempt to pilfer with agents on the ground. The same GRU unit that hacked John Podesta has allegedly sent operatives to Rio de Janeiro, Kuala Lumpur, and The Hague to practice what is known as "close-access hacking." Once on the ground, they use off-the-shelf electronic equipment to pry open the Wi-Fi network of whomever they're spying on. The Russians, in other words, take risks few other nations would dare. They are willing to go to such lengths because they've reaped such rich rewards from hacking.
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The Atlantic Warns About 2020 Election Security Holes and Possible Russian Interference More

The Atlantic Warns About 2020 Election Security Holes and Possible Russian Interference

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  • Hillary has been awfully quiet. Creepy Joe is being kept tied up in his basement as to not make a fool of himself. If Hillary/Joe hypothetically made it into office and keeled over in months, it would be Pelosi 2020. This is what people fear.

    The toilet paper of record "The Atlantic" can't come up with ANYTHING better than "THE RUSSIANZ!!1111"? Mueller had, what? TWO YEARS? Clinton knew best from her mentor Saul Alinsky: blame your opponents for your faults before you are called out for your faults. Indeed,

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nova77 ( 613150 )

      It's always surprising to me how much people are attracted to authoritarianism, regardless of the political background.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 )

      Pretty much everything in your post is wrong. It is certainly possible that Trump will win; a landslide looks unlikely. Frankly, I'm disturbed that such a highly partisan comment as yours which attempts to deliberately use insulting nicknames and scatological insults is raised up as informative without any attempt at sourcing. The fact is that as of right now, polls suggest a slight lean for Biden https://www.270towin.com/maps/consensus-2020-electoral-map-forecast [270towin.com] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls [fivethirtyeight.com]

      • There's no evidence that Biden's son's involvement in the natural gas company had any corrupt aspects

        The qpq with Biden, Sr., perhaps. But guys with connections aren't hired at 80k/month just coincidentally.

        Our government is lousy with relatives who mysteriously get rich.

        There doesn't even need to be a single word passed. Just doing the hiring buys unspoken goodwill. It's not dissimilar to hiring ex-officials at outrageous rates, not just for their connections, but as an advertisement to future ex-officials, "we like to hire people like you, wink wink , I hope things go easy for is so we can afford to h

      • Minor nit: Mitt Romney did not vote to impeach Donald Trump. Mitt Romney voted Trump is Guilty of charges brought to the senate trial as the result of impeachment.

        Also: You can emphasize that Muller accepted as fact that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. This was proved not by Muller but every single intelligence agency both in and outside the United States that investigated it and was not aligned with Russia itself.

        Famous testimony in congress: "It is almost as if they wanted us to know the

  • No voter ID.

    Followed by absentee / mail-in ballots / ballot harvesting.

    Then dirty voter registration lists.

    And precincts that report more votes than registered voters yet no investigations or arrests for blatant ballot box stuffing.

    Oh and about 1 million spots down the list at the very bottom, "RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nova77 ( 613150 )

      Care to provide any link for that?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Ah, so that commission led by the alleged president's Kansas nutjob, Kris Kobach, not even being able to conjure of up false reports of voter fraud means nothing to you? And this from an alleged administration who's alleged leader has written or uttered over 16,000 falsehoods since claiming office.

  • Meanwhile, there was never any proof demonsrated (Score:3, Informative)

    by melted ( 227442 ) on Sunday May 17, 2020 @04:07AM (#60069504) Homepage

    Meanwhile, there was never any proof demonstrated that Russians "hacked" anything at all, besides spending $100K on FB to organize anti-Trump events.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      That $100K was spent to run a bunch of ads, some pro-Trump and some pro-Hillary.

      It seems like Russia just wanted to watch the world burn. Well, watch the US burn.

    • Don't forget a ton of pretty irrelevant and ludicrous memes like Jesus saying you should quit masturbating, let him lend you a hand! No, I'm not kidding.

    • Re:Meanwhile, there was never any proof demonsrate (Score:4, Informative)

      by Quantum gravity ( 2576857 ) on Sunday May 17, 2020 @06:01AM (#60069680)

      John Podesta, Chairman of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, received a phishing email on March 19, 2016, sent by Russian operatives purporting to alert him of a "compromise in the system", and urging him to change his password "immediately" by clicking on a link. This allowed Russian hackers to access around 60,000 emails from Podesta's private account.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      Errr...go read the Senate report on Russian hacking. You don't see it because you do not want to.

      • Where is the FBI report of their examination of DNC computers? Oh wait, this is none...

  • Only Russia? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by John.Banister ( 1291556 ) * on Sunday May 17, 2020 @04:10AM (#60069512) Homepage
    I have to wonder how much effort it actually takes. From the description of how resistant some state governments are to securing their own elections, I get the feeling that a dozen countries and any strongly motivated billionaire could hack major chunks of these elections.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Cederic ( 9623 )

      The US knows how much effort it takes. They've done it to other countries enough to have learned from experience.

      What I find far more interesting is the disproportionate impact Russian interference is alleged to have on the elections. If their $100k of advertising and a room full of trolls managed to lose the 2016 election for Clinton with her hordes of volunteers and a $1.4bn budget that's a sad indictment of her campaign management.

      Who in 2020 is going to blame Russia? Well, who in 2016 was working with R

      • And the writer of this piece, Franklin Foer, was for years one of the folks out there so sure the investigation would be explosive, with "extraordinary implications". One might think it'd be bad for singleminded Russiagaters that the investigation largely seemed to show that Russia's role as wildly overblown and the Trump campaign's ties similarly so (not that there's nothing, but it's just the same humm of low-level corruption Trump and associates universally have), but I guess all those pundits are just p

      • You only know what was declassified. All the agencies with access agreed there was stuff going on and they only let out some of the info; even the GOP Senate controlled investigation agreed but didn't release everything. It upset trump that they dared agree with reality because longer term you don't want to hand over any power to Putin (unless you are Trump that is.)

        Russia hacked email servers and there is even video of them doing that which was completely secret to us until the FOREIGN government that gav

  • Since they hav e actually openly threatened to do it.

  • Everyone knows.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Real Dr John ( 716876 ) on Sunday May 17, 2020 @07:15AM (#60069720) Homepage

    The DNC and the RNC interfere with the elections far more than any other actor. In fact, if you want to point fingers at foreign countries that meddle in US elections, Israel would be at the top of the list, not Russia. Wealthy people and large corporations also meddle in US elections to the tune of billions of dollars per election cycle. It is meddling, but here in the US we call that "free speech".

  • The Russians are Comming! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bobbied ( 2522392 ) on Sunday May 17, 2020 @07:53AM (#60069780)

    The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming!

    I got news for you, they've always been here, well at least as long as I could vote they've been active in our elections in various ways. Why are we so enamored with their efforts to be disruptive to our country all of a sudden? It's not new.

    I'm beginning to think that somebody wants/needs and excuse for why things went the way they did and saying "we ran a bad campaign" or "we ran a horrible candidate" just isn't going to do. Oh no, it cannot be that our ideas didn't sell well enough, or that voters actually picked another tribe over ours.. That's simply not possible because we hold the corner of market on virtue, morality and anything else that matters. We should have won, we should ALWAYS win.

    This whole narrative is ridiculous if you ask me. The Russians are literally powerless. They are barely making it financially, their military is barely operating and struggling to survive on a shoestring budget, and they have little power or influence in the world anymore. Their economy is in shambles and although they are not communist anymore, they are effectively run by a dictatorship that rules by fear and violence. They are not some opponent to be feared on the geopolitical stage because they are barely surviving on their own.

    I say let them try. Catch them and slap their hands along with anybody who helps them, but don't worry about them. They are like an old man with no teeth who needs a walker, threatening to chase you down, chew you up and spit you out. It's funny that they've turned into the boogeyman who upsets elections, that the monster under the bed in 2020 might just be as scary as a dust bunny in reality. And ask yourself, what does it say about the folks who are *already* looking for a scapegoat, setting up to blame the Russians... Wow...

    • If you learn more about the known history of Russian interference, you'd know they only had a slight pause before Putin took over. Putin was in charge of "interference" efforts with the west and he didn't gut his former profession. They have more going on today than the Cold War with more money funding it. It's far more powerful and extremely CHEAP to pay agents than build expensive weapons plus those agents get jobs here in the USA which more than cover their costs. Even computer related work by highly s

      • we'd have 100% human counted paper ballots

        Humans are worse at counting than computers are. That was the entire motivation behind computers in the first place.

  • What rewards does Russia get out of this? Russia is embargo'd to shit and has had massive economic troubles for its aggressiveness. Even under Trump new sanctions were introduced which hit them hard after the Skripal assassination.

    Putin is paranoid about getting Arab Spring'd or Maidan'd. If he got a reward from his interference it's the fact he's still in power ... which pre-assumes his paranoia is justified.

    If his paranoia is not justified he's just making life more difficult for Russia with all this shit

    • What rewards does Russia get out of this? Russia is embargo'd to shit and has had massive economic troubles for its aggressiveness.

      The answer is in your own question.

      Putin wants the embargoes lifted. With Trump he sees (or did in the past) a way to do that.

      With Hillary or Joe there is no way those embargoes would be lifted unless they accede to the demands of the embargo.

      Even if Trump isn't able to perform that, every second he is president the U.S. gets weaker. They payoffs to Russia (and Putin, not necessarily the same thing) are immense, particularly given the tiny investment it has taken.

      • Trump is a simple man, he might feel kinship with authoritarians ... but they do need to know their place. A blatant assassination in the UK and hypersonic cruise missile posturing were a really fucking bad idea to get on his good side.

        Russia got sanctioned even more and Trump pushed the EU to build more infrastructure for shale gas imports ... it didn't work out for Russia's economy at all.

        The US has gotten less diplomatic influence under Trump, but the strength of the US never derived from diplomacy. Dipl

  • If enough Americans come to believe that Russia can do whatever it wants to our democratic processes without consequence, that, too, increases cynicism about American democracy, and thereby serves Russian ends.

    So MSNBC works for Russia. All this time everyone thought that MSNBC was crazy. In fact, while they pushing the story that Fox was crazy, they were crazy like a fox.

  • Democrats, not Russians, are interfering (Score:3)

    by walterbyrd ( 182728 ) on Sunday May 17, 2020 @12:35PM (#60070430)

    It wasn't the Russians that put boxes of ballots in the trunk of a rental car in Tampa.

    Look at Nancy Pelosi's so-called "Heroes Act" that is clearly designed to keep democrats in power forever.

    Democrats are pushing for no ID, mail-in ballots, and ballot harvesting. Dems, including illegals, will vote 400 times each, while all repub ballots end up in the trunk of a rental car somewhere.

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