Tag Archive for: Find

Independent experts find no foul play in 2020 election

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A new report from an independent review of Maricopa County’s 2020 election equipment supports what the county has said all along: the voting machines weren’t connected to the internet, and the county didn’t try to obstruct the state Senate’s audit or delete data. 

The report comes after the Arizona Senate and the county agreed in September 2021 that three independent computer security experts would review the county’s routers and answer the Senate’s questions in relation to the 2020 general election. Both parties agreed that former Congressman John Shadegg would act as an impartial “special master” to oversee the process. 

Six months later, the findings, which were released late Wednesday, fall in line with the county’s own independent election audits conducted more than a year ago. 

John Shadegg

The Senate’s election review team, headed by Cyber Ninjas, presented its report in September 2021, offering no evidence of widespread fraud. Its ballot hand count found Joe Biden received 99 more votes than the official tally. However, the Senate still wanted to examine the county’s routers and Splunk logs, which it had also subpoenaed earlier in the year. The county resisted, citing security concerns. But, faced with losing hundreds of millions of state-shared revenues for not complying with the subpoenas, the county eventually settled with the Senate to allow an independent review of the equipment. 

Shadegg’s report stated that the team found no evidence that “routers, managed switches, or election devices” connected to the Internet. He and the experts also found no evidence that the county obstructed the audit. 

“The special master and expert panel found no evidence of data deletion, data purging, data overwriting, or other destruction of evidence or obstruction of the audit,” the report stated. 

Maricopa County Board of Supervisors chairman Bill Gates said in a written statement that the report should be “a final stake in the heart of the Senate’s so-called ‘audit,’” pointing out that it concluded the ballot tabulation system was not connected to the internet and that county routers were not connected to the election…

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Students at Fayetteville Technical Community College find themselves on the front lines of 21st century warfare

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FAYETTEVILLE, N.C. (WTVD) — Fayetteville Technical Community College is training people to protect others from cyber attacks.

The FBI issued a new warning about the possibility of Russian cyber attacks on U.S. infrastructure, placing some students in Fayetteville on the front lines in a way they didn’t initially expect.

Christopher Barksdale is a retired veteran and former Army aircraft mechanic. Now, his new boot camp is inside a classroom at Fayetteville Technical Community College.

“It does kind of feel like you’re on the front line but in a digital sense,” Barksdale said. “You hear about digital attacks here and digital attacks there and it’s almost like you’re getting involved in a major conflict going on again.”

Barksdale enrolled in a six-week program designed to teach students foundation in cyber security.

Instructor Darryl Carter specializes in taking students with zero experience and building them into finely-tuned experts.

“The same technology that they use to operate your car is the same technology that they are going to use to try and break into your computer at home,” Carter explained. “So we have to (get) them scripting and we have to teach them software development and teach how programs are written and how to do that safely and effectively.”

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“Who dropped the DB?” Find out with Teleport Database Access • Graham Cluley

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Teleport

Graham Cluley Security News is sponsored this week by the folks at Teleport. Thanks to the great team there for their support!

You’re woken up at 3 am, only to discover your worst nightmare. The new intern just deleted the production database during routine maintenance by accident. You quickly restore from a backup. During the retrospective, you discover that while onboarding, access was provided to all databases, but with full permissions and very similar Postgres URLs, it quickly became apparent that this was an elementary mistake.

At Teleport, we help people solve these problems. First, we start with making it easy to connect the right resource securely, baking in best practices for bastion hosts and securing endpoints, and making sure to never expose a DB to the internet instead of going through the Teleport proxy. Next up, Teleport Authenticate makes it easy to onboard and offboard users, and Teleport Authorize makes sure that users and machines can perform specific tasks. E.g., Only let the intern read the production DB, but don’t let them drop it. Lastly, Teleport Audit Log provides a stream of structured events that make monitoring and early detection of issues a breeze.

All of this might sound expensive, but all of the above features are available in our free & open-source community edition. At Teleport, we believe the strongest security should be available to all, and if your company has specific compliance requirements or needs advanced workflows, Teleport can help with its Enterprise edition.

Try Teleport

We have a few options to try Teleport. You can start with one of our many getting started guides, or try an interactive demo track for Teleport Server Access & Teleport Kubernetes Access.

If you’re interested in sponsoring my site for a week, and reaching an IT-savvy audience that cares about computer security, you can find more information here.

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‘Hackers helped me find my lost Bitcoin fortune’

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rhonda and megan kampert

Rhonda Kampert (left) used her recovered Bitcoin to help her daughter, Megan, through university

Rhonda Kampert was an early adopter.

She bought six Bitcoins in 2013, when they cost about $80 (£60) each, and were the chatter of niche corners of the internet.

“I used to listen to a radio talk show and they started talking about crypto and Bitcoin so I got interested,” she says.

“Back then buying it was so complicated but I fumbled my way through the process and bought my coins.”

Rhonda, who lives in the US state of Illinois, spent some of her digital money over the next year or so, then forgot about it.

But when she saw headlines late in 2017 announcing that the value of Bitcoin had risen to nearly $20,000 she excitedly went to her computer to log in and cash out.

‘It was awful’

Except there was a problem. She was missing some of the login details for her Bitcoin wallet – a computer program or device that stores a set of secret numbers, or private keys.

“I realised then that my printout had missed some digits on the end of my wallet identifier. I had a piece of paper with my password but no idea what my wallet ID was,” Rhonda says.

“It was awful. I tried everything for months but it was hopeless. So I kind of gave up.”

Fast forward to last spring and the value of Bitcoin soared above $50,000 – more than 600 times what Rhonda had paid eight years earlier.

Filled with a renewed determination to find her coins, she hit the internet and came across father and son crypto treasure hunters Chris and Charlie Brooks.

chris and charlie brooks

Charlie and Chris Brooks say they have recovered Bitcoins worth a seven-figure sum in the past year

“After talking to the guys online for a while I trusted them enough to hand over all the details I could remember. Then I waited,” she says.

“Eventually we sat down together on a video call and watched everything happen. Chris opened the wallet and there it was. I just felt so relieved!”

Rhonda’s wallet of three-and-a-half Bitcoin was at that point worth $175,000.

“I gave Chris and Charlie their 20%, then the first thing I did was take out $10,000 worth of my coins to help my daughter Megan through college.”

She says she’s keeping the rest locked away in a hardware wallet – a…

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