Oak Ridge, spear phishing, and internet voting – Freedom to Tinker
Oak Ridge National Labs (one of the US national energy labs, along with Sandia, Livermore, Los Alamos, etc) had a bunch of people fall for a spear phishing attack (see articles in Computerworld and many other descriptions). For those not familiar with the term, spear phishing is sending targeted emails at specific recipients, designed to have them do an action (e.g., click on a link) that will install some form of software (e.g., to allow stealing information from their computers). This is distinct from spam, where the goal is primarily to get you to purchase pharmaceuticals, or maybe install software, but in any case is widespread and not targeted at particular victims. Spear phishing is the same technique used in the Google Aurora (and related) cases last year, the RSA case earlier this year, Epsilon a few weeks ago, and doubtless many others that we haven’t heard about. Targets of spear phishing might be particular people within an organization (e.g., executives, or people on a particular project). Full Article
NM: Thousands of voter files altered; Bernalillo County clerk demands SOS restrict database access – Veritas NM.com
A few days after New Mexico Secretary of State Dianna Duran notified all 33 county clerks that their biennial voter purge would be canceled this year, Deputy Bernalillo County Clerk Robert Adams made a disturbing discovery — 44,601 county files stored on the state’s voter registration database had been accessed and altered. Accustomed to spending long hours in front of his computer, Adams says he was shocked to learn informational “flags,” which are attached to voter files after mail is returned by the U.S. Postal Service as undeliverable, had simply vanished on Valentine’s Day. After securely logging on to the database, known as PowerProfile, Adam’s heart began beating a little faster as he started considering worst-case scenarios. He needed to know what happened before the Bernalillo County Board of Voter Registrations was convened the third Monday of March, the date required by state statute. Adams worried a criminal might have breached a government intranet connection with the goal of stealing voters’ social security and driver license numbers and other sensitive personal identification information, including voters’ dates of birth and addresses. Later the same chilly February morning, however, Adams determined the flags had been deleted by an unauthorized technician at Nebraska-based Elections Systems and Software (ES&S) without his, or County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver’s written or verbal permission. Full Article
A funny thing happened recently to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on its way to nailing an alleged illegal voter. Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) investigative arm found that clerical mistakes are sometimes made and that people can be accused of trying to vote illegally when they actually didn’t.
It’s still a year and a half until the presidential election, but members of Florida’s Legislature are already jockeying over who will be able to vote and how.