Tag Archive for: georgia

Fulton county’s systems were hacked. Already weary officials are tight-lipped | Georgia


As a Fulton county, Georgia, board of registration and elections meeting began in earnest on Thursday afternoon, the elections director, Nadine Williams, unfurled a prepared statement about a recent hack of county government computers.

“There is no indication that this event is related to the election process,” Williams said. “In an abundance of caution, Fulton county and the secretary of state’s respective technology systems were isolated from one another as part of the response efforts. We are working with our team to securely reconnect these systems as preparations for upcoming elections continue.”

Any time the Fulton county elections board meets, a cantankerous crowd greets them to pepper appointees with challenges to voter registrations or demands for paper ballots or generally unsympathetic noise. The rancor of the 2020 election and its unfounded charges of vote tampering still ripple through the democratic process. Elections officials in Fulton county take care about what they say, knowing that a platoon of critics lie waiting to pounce on a misplaced word.

Even by that standard, county officials have been holding uncharacteristically tightly to a prepared script – or saying nothing at all – in the days since a computer breach debilitated everything from the tax and water billing department to court records to phones.

“Because it’s under investigation, they’re telling me to stick to a list of talking points,” said the Fulton county commissioner Bridget Thorne. “The county attorney drafted them.”

She did say that the county had come under a ransomware attack – and that the county had not paid off the attacker. “We’re insured very well,” she said.

Systems began to fail on the weekend of 27 January. Ten days later, the phones for most departments returned a busy signal error when callers rang them up.

County officials either cannot or will not directly and completely answer important questions about the cyber-attack’s scope. The Fulton county chair Robb Pitts made a brief statement on 29 January about the hack without taking questions.

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Former network security COO pleads guilty to hacking Georgia hospital


On Nov. 16, a cybersecurity contractor admitted guilt for unlawfully accessing the computer systems of Lawrenceville, Ga.-based Gwinnett Medical Center back in 2018, Law360 reported.

Vikas Singla, who was the COO of a metro Atlanta network security firm specializing in healthcare, pleaded guilty to orchestrating a cyberattack on Gwinnett, according to the publication.

During the attack, phone lines were disrupted, as well as the network printer service.

Mr. Singla also was able to illicitly obtain data from a digitizing device from the hospital during the attack. 

The government said the crime cost Gwinnett Medical Center $800,000 and that the cyberattack was, in part, carried out with the intention of securing financial benefits for Mr. Singla’s company.

Mr. Singla was indicted by a federal grand jury on June 8, 2021.

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Georgia School District Goes Offline After Suspicious Activity


(TNS) — Henry County Schools Superintendent Mary Elizabeth Davis said Tuesday leaders continue to investigate “suspicious activity” that has resulted in the district restricting Internet access since last week.

In a video posted to YouTube, Davis did not say what activity led the south metro Atlanta district to decide to take its Internet offline on Thursday, but said that student services, payroll, billing and other district operations remain functional as the school system conducts a probe of its network.

“What we know now is that last week suspicious activity was detected on our network,” she said. “And as you would expect, we take matters of this nature very seriously.”


The district’s investigators are being joined by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, Henry County Police Department and others in its probe, Davis said.

Henry Schools said late last week that district operations ”will continue for students with the exception of online courses.” In addition, leaders said lunches, bus services and after-school activities would “continue as normal.” The livestream of the Henry school board’s Monday meeting was canceled because of the district’s restricted Internet functions.

Davis did not say when Internet functionality would return to the system or when the district might have answers in the investigation, including defining the “suspicious activity.”

She did, however, seek to find a bright side to the challenges.

“It really has been amazing to see the agility of our organization kick in,” she said. “As always, the Henry County team of professionals, our students and our parents have responded with amazing adaptability as we keep school operations going, maintain student learning and maintain functionality of our core business applications.”

©2023 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Georgia official’s dismissal of security audit could mean trouble in 2024


For the second time in four years, Georgia’s secretary of state stands at the center of a fight over the legitimacy of a U.S. presidential election. Only now, Brad Raffensperger — the Republican who once stood up to Donald Trump’s election fraud lies — is the one security experts see as the problem.

In a letter sent to state lawmakers last week, Raffensperger argues that a newly unsealed audit finding that there are dangerous vulnerabilities in Georgia’s widely used voting machine software is overblown and no fixes are needed.

“It’s more likely that I could win the lottery without buying a ticket” than that hackers flip enough votes to swing the election, he says in the letter.

But Raffensperger’s dismissive reaction to the unsparing audit conducted by security expert Alex Halderman has turned him into an object of intense criticism from cybersecurity specialists, who say he is painting legitimate research with the brush of far-right conspiracy theories — and imperiling the 2024 elections in the process.

“Raffensperger has lumped us with the election deniers,” said David Jefferson, a computer scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and an expert on election technology. “But we cannot, out of fear of that confusion, stop talking about these vulnerabilities. They are real, they are there, and they must be addressed.”

Before its release last week, the analysis of Dominion Voting Systems’ ImageCastX ballot-marking devices was kept under seal for roughly two years as part of a long-running legal dispute between Raffensperger and local voting rights activists arguing the machines need to be replaced by hand-marked paper ballots.

Georgia is one of just two states in the country to use these ballot-marking devices as the primary form of voting across every precinct, and the plaintiffs — a Georgia-based non-profit group called the Coalition for Good Governance — have alleged its dependence on them is unacceptably risky because of the way the ImageCastX records voter’s choices: via machine-printed barcodes voters can’t corroborate with their own eyes.

The state has maintained throughout the court challenge that it has adequate…

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