Tag Archive for: real

McDermott: Governor’s take on security breach shows who’s the real ‘enemy of the people’ | Kevin McDermott

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This was, in fact, a “freely available” website, with no “permission” needed to access it.

• “This individual [was] acting against a state agency to compromise teachers’ personal information in an attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.”

Renaud made clear in his story that he stumbled upon the Social Security numbers while looking for a way to aggregate public teacher certification data. There was no ill intent.

Which brings us to a significant and inexcusable omission: Parson knew that the warning from Renaud was the only reason the administration even learned it was putting teachers at risk. Yet Parson made no mention of that in his press conference.

Parson vowed that “we will not let this crime against Missouri teachers go unpunished.” Parson knows perfectly well there wasn’t any “crime” here.

Only Parson knows why he decided to misrepresent this episode to the public. But it’s worth noting that a PAC that supports him was using those misrepresentations in a fundraising appeal last week.

To review: More than 100,000 teachers were at risk from a security flaw in a state website. A journalist discovered that risk, alerted the state, and even gave the state time to fix the problem before publishing the story. Now Parson is focused not on figuring out who screwed this up, but on persecuting the journalist who revealed the screwup.

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McDermott: Governor’s take on security breach show who’s the real ‘enemy of the people’ | Kevin McDermott

/in


This was, in fact, a “freely available” website, with no “permission” needed to access it.

• “This individual [was] acting against a state agency to compromise teachers’ personal information in an attempt to embarrass the state and sell headlines for their news outlet.”

Renaud made clear in his story that he stumbled upon the Social Security numbers while looking for a way to aggregate public teacher certification data. There was no ill intent.

Which brings us to a significant and inexcusable omission: Parson knew that the warning from Renaud was the only reason the administration even learned it was putting teachers at risk. Yet Parson made no mention of that in his press conference.

Parson vowed that “we will not let this crime against Missouri teachers go unpunished.” Parson knows perfectly well there wasn’t any “crime” here.

Only Parson knows why he decided to misrepresent this episode to the public. But it’s worth noting that a PAC that supports him was using those misrepresentations in a fundraising appeal last week.

To review: More than 100,000 teachers were at risk from a security flaw in a state website. A journalist discovered that risk, alerted the state, and even gave the state time to fix the problem before publishing the story. Now Parson is focused not on figuring out who screwed this up, but on persecuting the journalist who revealed the screwup.

Source…

False claims on voting machines obscure real flaws

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article

ATLANTA – The aftermath of the 2020 election put an intense spotlight on voting machines as supporters of former President Donald Trump claimed victory was stolen from him. While the theories were unproven — and many outlandish and blatantly false — election security experts say there are real concerns that need to be addressed.

In Georgia, for example, election security expert J. Alex Halderman says he’s identified “multiple severe security flaws” in the state’s touchscreen voting machines, according to a sworn declaration in a court case.

Halderman told The Associated Press in a phone interview that while he’s seen no evidence the vulnerabilities were exploited to change the outcome of the 2020 election, “there remain serious risks that policymakers and the public need to be aware of” that should be addressed immediately to protect future elections.

Trump loyalists — pushing the slogan “Stop the Steal” — held rallies, posted on social media and filed lawsuits in key states, often with false claims about Dominion Voting Systems voting machines. Almost all of the legal challenges casting doubt on the outcome of the election have been dismissed or withdrawn and many claims of fraud debunked. State and federal election officials have said there’s no evidence of widespread fraud. And Dominion has fought back forcefully, filing defamation lawsuits against high-profile Trump allies.

As an election security researcher, it’s been frustrating to watch the proliferation of misinformation, said Matt Blaze, a professor of computer science and law at Georgetown University. For years, he said, concerns raised by election security experts were dismissed as unimportant.

“All of a sudden, people are going the other way, saying the existence of a flaw not only is something that should be fixed, it means the election was actually stolen,” he said. “That’s not true either.”

David Cross is an attorney for plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit filed by proponents of hand-marked paper ballots. His clients’ concerns about Georgia’s electronic voting machines long preceded the 2020 election, but he says they’re now grappling with how to expose…

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Biden Warns a ‘Real Shooting War’ Could Come From Cyber Breach

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President Joe Biden told U.S. intelligence officials on Tuesday that he thinks a cyber breach could lead to a “shooting war” with a major global power.

“I think it’s more likely we’re going to end up—if we end up in a war, a real shooting war, with a major power—it’s going to be as a consequence of a cyber breach of great consequence,” Biden said during a visit to the Office of the Direct of National Intelligence, according to a recording of his visit.

Biden did not clarify how the U.S. measures a breach “of great consequence,” but his remarks come after a series of Russian ransomware attacks and other cyberattacks have hit U.S. government and private sector entities. The American public has become intimately familiar with how ransomware attacks, especially those against a pipeline operator and meat supplier in recent months, can cause disruptions in Americans’ day-to-day lives.

“We’ve seen how cyberthreats including ransomware attacks increasingly are able to cause damage and disruption in the real world,” Biden told the approximately 120 ODNI staff in attendance.

The U.S. has long taken actions to retaliate against cyberattacks that have pummeled U.S. entities in recent years. It has sanctioned individuals it says are linked with attacks, indicted some, and called out different foreign government entities, such as China’s counterintelligence agency, the Ministry of State Security, for its involvement in cyberattacks. Cyber Command has worked to disrupt Russian government-linked hackers that sought to intervene in U.S. elections in recent years by sending them direct messages and interrupting their internet access.

And while Biden has said in recent months that he wouldn’t rule out a retaliatory cyberattack in response to one targeting U.S. entities, his remarks raised the specter that the U.S., or another adversary, might escalate its responses to cyberattacks in the future.

Sen. Angus King (I-ME), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, echoed Biden’s concerns in comments to The Daily Beast.

“I think what it means is he understands that a cyberattack can be easily as destructive if not more so than a dropping of a missile or a bomb and…

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