
OctoStatement released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine regarding alleged provocation by Belarus (accusations by Belarus that Ukraine was planning an attack on Belarus territory) Read more President Joe Biden's comments regarding the "prospect of Armageddon" on Sunday, saying that the President's statement reflects "the very high stakes that are in play”, in relation to Russian President Vladimir Putin's nuclear threats. OctoWhite House national security spokesman John Kirby addressed U.S. Russia’s continued strikes in Ukraine pose a direct threat to civilians and civilian infrastructure. Event: Russia has launched attacks against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure as well as government facilities in Kyiv and elsewhere. But you can’t just wave a magic wand and do that, you need significant funding."Įlections officials have made significant progress on improving election infrastructure defenses and establishing channels for information-sharing, but as the midterm elections loom, replacing vulnerable voting machines-and finding the funding to do it-remain troublingly unfinished. "The question I hear from the states and counties, though, is just 'how are we going to pay for it?' They would love to have skilled IT staff, they would love to hold trainings for their workers, they would love to replace their old equipment.

"This report underscores that when you’re using technology there can be a variety of problems, and with something as important as election results you want to get it right," says David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research. In July, for example, only one of the three top vendors sent a representative to a Senate Rules Committee election security hearing, prompting an outcry from lawmakers. ES&S stopped manufacturing the Model 650 in 2008, and notes that "the base-level security protections on the M650 are not as advanced as the security protections that exist on the voting machines ES&S manufactures today." The company still sells the decade-old device, though.Ĭongress has worked recently to investigate voting machine vendor accountability, but progress has been slow. Voting Village participants also found a network vulnerability in the same device-which 26 states and the District of Columbia all currently use.
DEFCON WARN UPDATE
In particular, one ballot counter made by Election Systems & Software, the Model 650, has a flaw in its update architecture first documented in 2007 that persists. Some vulnerabilities detailed in the report were disclosed years ago and still haven't been resolved.
DEFCON WARN SOFTWARE
Many of the machines participants analyzed during the Voting Village run software written in the early 2000s, or even the 1990s. "When you’re using technology there can be a variety of problems, and with something as important as election results you want to get it right."Īnalyzing voting machines for flaws raises another important controversy about the role of vendors in improving device security. And to me that is both the unsurprising and terribly disturbing lesson that came out of the Voting Village." "What we discovered was vulnerabilities that we know about are easy to find, easy to reengineer, and have not been fixed over the course of more than a decade of knowing about them.


"We didn't discover a lot of new vulnerabilities," says Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the organizers of the Voting Village, who has been analyzing voting machine security for more than 10 years.

The findings also connect to larger efforts to safeguard US elections, including initiatives to expand oversight of voting machine vendors and efforts to fund state and local election security upgrades.
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All of the models are in active use around the US, and the vulnerabilities-from weak password protections to elaborate avenues for remote access-number in the dozens. The report details vulnerabilities in seven models of voting machines and vote counters, found during the DefCon security conference's Voting Village event. New research, though, shows they haven't done nearly enough, particularly when it comes to voting machines. While Russian interference operations in the 2016 US presidential elections focused on misinformation and targeted hacking, officials have scrambled ever since to shore up the nation's vulnerable election infrastructure.
