Tag Archive for: Election

DHS warns of new Russia hacks as US sanctions Russia over election interference

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Enlarge / Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin sees what you did there, Russia. (credit: Getty Images)

The Treasury Department announced new economic sanctions today on the Russian Federation and on individuals and organizations implicated in interference with the 2016 US presidential elections—just as the Department of Homeland Security released a new warning of new “Russian government cyber activity” aimed at the US government and US critical infrastructure providers.

The sanctions are being carried out as part of an amendment to the Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama in 2015. The Trump administration imposed the new sanctions—the first the administration has imposed under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), which was passed by Congress last year—a month after officially blaming Russian intelligence for the NotPetya worm.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced the sanctions, explaining that “the administration is confronting and countering malign Russian cyber activity, including their attempted interference in US elections, destructive cyber-attacks, and intrusions targeting critical infrastructure.” The new sanctions, he said, are part of “a broader effort to address the ongoing nefarious attacks emanating from Russia. Treasury intends to impose additional CAATSA sanctions, informed by our intelligence community, to hold Russian government officials and oligarchs accountable for their destabilizing activities by severing their access to the US financial system.”

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Twitter begins emailing the 677,775 Americans who took Russian election bait

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Enlarge / Maybe Twitter should try this approach for the 677,775 emails it says it will soon send to affected users. (credit: Warner Bros. / Sam Machkovech)

On Friday, Twitter took an end-of-the-week opportunity to dump some better-late-than-never news onto its userbase. For anybody who followed or engaged with a Twitter account that faked like an American during the 2016 election season but was actually linked to a major Russian propaganda campaign, you’re about to get an email.

Twitter announced that it would contact a massive number of users with that news: 677,775 users to be exact. This count includes those who interacted with the 3,814 accounts that Twitter has directly linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), the Russian troll farm whose election-related meddling was exposed in 2017.

That number of accounts, Twitter noted, is a jump from Twitter’s prior count of 2,812 IRA-linked trolls, which it had disclosed as part of an October 2017 hearing in Congress. Twitter says that this specific pool of troll accounts generated 175,993 posts during the 2016 period of activity that Twitter has been analyzing, and the service noted that 8.4 percent of those posts were “election-related.” In its Friday disclosure, Twitter did not take the opportunity to acknowledge how the remaining percentage of these posts, which included anything from “I’m a real person” idle banter to indirect and divisive messaging, may have ultimately contributed to the troll farm’s impact. (For example: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey bit, and bit hard, on a known IRA account by retweeting two of its 2016 posts.)

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Hacking the vote: Threats keep changing, but election IT sadly stays the same

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Enlarge / A voting machine is submitted to abuse in DEFCON’s Voting Village in July. (credit: Sean Gallagher)

The outcome of the 2016 presidential election is history. But allegations of voter fraud, election interference by foreign governments, and intrusions into state electoral agencies’ systems have since cast a pall over the system that determines who makes the laws and enforces them in the United States. Such problems will not disappear no matter what comes out of a presidential commission or a Congressional hearing.

“Amazon will not go out of business because one percent of its transactions are fraudulent,” said David Jefferson, a visiting computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and chairman of the Verified Voting Foundation, a non-governmental organization working toward accuracy, integrity, and verifiability of elections. “That’s not the case for elections.”

Jefferson’s words came during his talk at the latest edition of DEFCON, the annual infosec event. Election hacks naturally became something of an overarching theme within the Caesar’s Palace convention center this summer. In fact, there was an entire room dedicated solely to testing the reliability of US electronic voting systems. Called “Voting Village,” the space was filled with more than 25 pieces of electoral hardware—voting machines and other electronic election-management equipment—in various stages of deconstruction. Any curious conference attendee, no matter where they fell within the conference’s wide technical skill spectrum, could contribute to the onslaught of software and hardware hacks targeting the machines in this de facto lab.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Email dump hits French candidate Macron ahead of election

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Another political campaign has been hit by an email dump. This time, the target is French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron.

On Friday, his campaign said a massive and coordinated hack had breached the email inboxes of several staffers. This came after a mysterious user named “EMLEAKS” apparently dumped the stolen data through torrent files on text storage site Pastebin.

It’s unclear if the information in the dump is genuine. Allegedly, the dump contains a 9GB trove of emails and photos. The torrent files, which were hosted on Archive.org, are no longer available there.

But Macron’s campaign said the leaked files have been spreading over social media as the country prepares to vote for a new president on Sunday.

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