Monthly Archives: July 2019

Libyan security forces have arrested two men accused of working for a Russian troll farm seeking to influence elections in the oil exporter and other African countries. A letter from the state prosecutor of the internationally-backed Tripoli government to a Libyan security chief said the men were involved in “securing a meeting” with Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi, the fugitive son of the ousted dictator and a potential presidential candidate who enjoys the backing of some officials in Moscow. Russia’s foreign ministry said it was aware of the reports and was seeking to verify them. “We haven’t received an official notification from the Libyan side regarding this matter,” the foreign ministry’s press service said. Laptops and memory sticks found with the suspects showed that they worked for an outfit identified as Fabrika Trollei, Russian for Troll Factory, that “specializes in influencing elections that are to be held in several African states” including Libya, the letter, stamped by the attorney general’s office and obtained by Bloomberg, stated. Two Libyan government officials with direct knowledge of the matter confirmed the authenticity of the document. Fabrika Trollei was the moniker given to a network of media and political outfits connected to Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who’s been accused by the U.S. of funding and organizing operations to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Prigozhin has been in contact with representatives of Saif al-Islam over his future political role, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Europe: Europe Built a System to Fight Russian Meddling. It’s Struggling. | Matt Apuzzo/The New York Times

The European Union launched an ambitious effort earlier this year to combat election interference: an early-warning system that would sound alarms about Russian propaganda. Despite high expectations, however, records show that the system has become a repository for a mishmash of information, produced no alerts and is already at risk of becoming defunct. Indeed, even before the European Parliament elections this spring, an inside joke was circulating in Brussels about the Rapid Alert System: It’s not rapid. There are no alerts. And there’s no system. Europe’s early struggles offer lessons for other nations, including the United States, where intelligence officials expect Russia to try to interfere in next year’s presidential election. In many ways, the European Union has been more aggressive than Washington in demanding changes from social media companies and seeking novel ways to fight disinformation. But doing so has pushed the bloc into thorny areas where free speech, propaganda and national politics intersect. Efforts to identify and counter disinformation have proven not only deeply complicated, but also politically charged. The new Rapid Alert System — a highly touted network to notify governments about Russian efforts before they metastasized as they did during the 2016 American elections — is just the latest example.

Guatemala: Over 23,000 extra votes nulled and void in Guatemala elections | MENAFN

Three weeks after the Guatemalan presidential election, and subsequent to difficulties associated with the transmission of the results by computer systems, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) cannot explain why 23,000 extra votes were originally counted and how the voters were registered. The finding was made after comparing candidates’ official figures with the ones that appear on the TSE website. The TSE confirmed two weeks ago that its system had made an error in the vote-counting process. Nine political parties have had more than 2,000 votes each subtracted from their totals as the TSE numbers continue to reveal inconsistencies. Javier Zepeda, executive director of the Chamber of Industry, explained previously that ‘… one should not take for speculation or misrepresent what was a calculation error with a fraud.’ The electoral body has denied any kind of fraud several times, and its director, Gustavo Castillo, previously explained the agency’s own software was to blame. Castillo said the error was human and that some party numbers on ballots weren’t clear or legible, so data was registered incorrectly.

India: Supreme Court refuses to entertain plea questioning electronic voting machine use in elections | ANI

The Supreme Court on Friday refused to entertain a plea which questioned the use of electronic voting machines (EVM) in polls and sought the cancellation of recently concluded Lok Sabha elections. A Bench headed by Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman heard the public interest litigation (PIL) filed by advocate Manohar Lal Sharma challenging the use of EVMs in polls. “What are you asking for Mr Sharma? You want us to set aside the entire Lok Sabha elections?” said Justice Nariman refusing to interfere with the petition, terming it “devoid of merits”.

Namibia: Electronic voting machines to be tested in public | Sakeus Iikela/The Namibian

The Electoral Commission of Namibia will hold a public event where technicians will test the electronic voting machines (EVMs) for possible defects. ECN chairperson Notemba Tjipueja told a media event in Windhoek yesterday that the commission has received numerous requests from political parties and a parliamentary standing committee to investigate whether the EVMs can be hacked. She said the public testing of the EVMs will be held on 18 July 2019, and the commission will use information technology (IT) students from the Namibia University of Science and Technology to test the machines. The ECN boss said political parties will also be allowed to bring their own technicians to confirm “any allegations they might have with regards to the EVMs”.

Oman: Electronic voting system to be used for the first time in Shura elections | Times Of Oman

For the first time in the Sultanate, an electronic voting system will be used for elections to the Shura. The system, called ‘Sawtak’, translates to ‘your voice’ and consists of a touch screen, in which the procedures and steps of the election are explained so that the voter can easily choose the candidate. The design of the system is suited to various categories of voters, including the elderly and disabled people, the Ministry of Interior said. A statement online said, “In light of the Ministry of Interior’s keenness to use the latest modern technology in the electoral process, which makes it easier for voters to cast their votes, the elections of this period will witness electronic voting at all polling stations for the first time.” The Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Interior, Chairman of the Main Committee of the Shura Council Elections for the ninth term, signed a contract with the Industrial Management and Contracting Technology Company (AMTAC)to design, supply and install the electronic voting system for the ninth period elections.

Switzerland: No e-vote option for the Swiss parliamentary election | SWI

Swiss Post has suspended its e-voting system effectively spelling the end of the online trials with the current technology for the October parliamentary elections. The state-owned company said it took the decision after the government announced last week that it will drop plans to introduce e-voting as an official voting channel for the time being. However, Swiss Post pledged to develop a new, updated version with universal verifiability available from 2020, according to statementexternal link on Friday. The current system of Swiss Post has been in use in four cantons on a trial basis, notably the registered expat Swiss community living around the world. Last month, a rival system developed by canton Geneva and used by three other cantons, was also withdrawn with immediate effect. The moves come amid increasing opposition against e-voting for data security reasons.

National: Time’s running out if Congress wants to boost 2020 election security | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

If Congress wants to deliver more money for states to secure the 2020 election against hackers, it had better get moving. That’s the message from Vermont’s top election official, Jim Condos (D), who ends his term as president of the National Association of Secretaries of State this week. There are just about six months left during which states could responsibly spend a big infusion of federal money aimed at protecting the 2020 contest, Condos told me. If Congress approves new funding after that, most of it won’t be spent until the next federal election cycle, he said. The warning comes as intelligence officials are cautioning that Russia and other U.S. adveraries are likely to try to interfere in the 2020 election in a repeat of the Russian hacking and disinformation operation that upended the 2016 contest. “It takes time to plan, to do assessments. We all have procurement rules we have to follow … and we want to be responsible stewards of congressional money,” Condos told me by phone from the National Association of Secretaries of States’s summer conference in Santa Fe, N.M. The prospects of Congress delivering new money in that timeframe don’t look good.

National: Hacking, Glitches, Disinformation: Why Experts Are Worried About the 2020 Census | Chris Hamby/The New York Times

In the run-up to the 2020 census, the government has embraced technology as never before, hoping to halt the ballooning cost of the decennial head count. For the first time, households will have the option of responding online, and field workers going door to door will be equipped with smartphones to log the information they collect. To make it all work, the Census Bureau needed more computing power and digital storage space, so it turned to cloud technology provided by Amazon Web Services. What the bureau didn’t realize — until an audit last year — was that there was an unsecured door to sensitive data left open. Access credentials for an account with virtually unlimited privileges had been lost, potentially allowing a hacker to view, alter or delete information collected during recent field tests. The Census Bureau says that it has closed off this vulnerability and that no information was compromised. But the discovery of the problem highlights the myriad risks facing next year’s all-important head count.

National: US Cyber Command issues alert about hackers exploiting Outlook vulnerability | Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet

US Cyber Command has issued an alert via Twitter today about threat actors abusing an Outlook vulnerability to plant malware on government networks. The vulnerability is CVE-2017-11774, a security bug that Microsoft patched in Outlook in the October 2017 Patch Tuesday. The Outlook bug, discovered and detailed by security researchers from SensePost, allows a threat actor to escape from the Outlook sandbox and run malicious code on the underlying operating system. The bug was privately reported by SensePost researchers in the fall of 2017, but by 2018, it had been weaponized by an Iranian state-sponsored hacking group known as APT33 (or Elfin), primarily known for developing the Shamoon disk-wiping malware. At the time, in late December 2018, ATP33 hackers were deploying backdoors on web servers, which they were later using to push the CVE-2017-11774 exploit to users’ inboxes, so they can infect their systems with malware.

Editorials: Enact election-security reforms now | The Seattle Times

Last week’s Democratic debates were an important marker on the road to the 2020 election. They were also a reminder that time is quickly running out for Congress to enact legislation that will safeguard against foreign actors’ attempts to manipulate the results. There is ample evidence of Russian agents’ multipronged attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. U.S. intelligence agencies warn that such interference continues with the FBI director calling it a “significant counterintelligence threat.” And in a recent Associated Press poll, more than half of Americans said there they were very concerned about foreign meddling in U.S. elections. Much of the blame for congressional inaction on this issue has been rightly laid at the feet of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who has refused to allow elections security bills to see the light of day. At the same time, Congress’ shotgun approach is not helping. Lawmakers must focus their attention on bipartisan solutions and stop wasting time on bills doomed to fail along party lines.

California: Lawmakers Consider Deepfake Ban for Election Integrity | Andrew Sheller/San Luis Obispo Tribune

California lawmakers, citing election integrity, are moving to ban the distribution of “deepfake” video or audio clips aimed at damaging political candidates, drawing condemnation from First Amendment supporters. The move comes as lawmakers fear that sophisticated doctored clips, such as one falsely portraying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as slurring her words, could allow malicious parties to sabotage the election. Assembly Bill 730, sponsored by Assemblyman Marc Berman, D-Palo Alto, passed unanimously out of the Assembly and now is being considered by the Senate Committee on Elections and Constitutional Amendments. AB 730 specifically prohibits “a person committee or other entity from knowingly or recklessly distributing deceptive audio or visual media of a candidate with the intent to injure the candidate’s reputation or to deceive a voter into voting for or against the candidate within 60 days of an election at which a candidate for elective office will appear on the ballot,” according to that committee’s analysis of the bill.

Georgia: Server image mystery in Georgia election security case | Frank Bajak/Associated Press

The case of whether hackers may have tampered with elections in Georgia has taken another strange turn. Nearly two years ago, state lawyers in a closely watched election integrity lawsuit told the judge they intended to subpoena the FBI for the forensic image, or digital snapshot, the agency made of a crucial server before state election officials quietly wiped it clean. Election watchdogs want to examine the data to see if there might have been tampering, given that the server was left exposed by a gaping security hole for more than half a year. A new email obtained by The Associated Press says state officials never did issue the subpoena, even though the judge had ordered that evidence be preserved, including from the FBI. The FBI data is central to activists’ challenge to Georgia’s highly questioned, centrally administered elections system, which lacks an auditable paper trail and was run at the time by Gov. Brian Kemp, then Georgia’s secretary of state. The plaintiffs contend Kemp’s handling of the wiped server is the most glaring example of mismanagement that could be hiding evidence of vote tampering. They have been fighting for access to the state’s black-box voting systems and to individual voting machines, many of which they say have also been altered in violation of court order.

Nevada: New election laws impact Nevada voters | Terri Russell/KOLO

Imagine not having to meet various deadlines to register to vote in Nevada. Instead, during early voting or even on Election Day, you can register and vote all at the same time. ”And they are also going to be able to register to vote online from home during the early voting period and then go to the polling place and case a ballot,” says Wayne Thorley, Nevada Deputy Secretary of State for Elections. Same-day registration is just one of the many new laws Nevada’s Secretary of State must contend with before the presidential election in 2020. The office is working on ways to connect the same-day registration, probably online, confirm it and place it in the system along with the votes cast.

Canada: Northwest Territories to be 1st province or territory to use online voting in general election | Hilary Bird/CBC News

In a move to increase voter turnout, the Northwest Territories will soon become the first jurisdiction in Canada to use online voting in a provincial or territorial election. Polls will open on Oct. 1 to elect 19 members to the N.W.T. Legislative Assembly, but people can vote in advance polls as early as Sept. 6. Voters can use a new website called Electorhood to access the Simply Voting online system to cast their ballots. Using the site, eligible voters can vote online from Sept. 6 up until the end of election day on Oct. 1 as long as they’ve registered for the absentee ballot beforehand. “I know elections isn’t very sexy for a lot of people but they don’t realize that they have a Cadillac of a system,” said Nicole Latour, chief electoral officer of the N.W.T. Latour said she’s optimistic the new website and online voting system will encourage more young people to log on and cast their ballots.

Canada: Federal political parties receiving classified security briefings on potential campaign threats | Bill Curry and Janice Dickson/The Globe and Mail

Federal political parties are now receiving classified security briefings about potential foreign interference in the October election campaign, but Canadian intelligence officials say no specific threat has so far been identified. The private briefings for political parties by security officials are one element of a plan announced in January that included the creation of a Security and Intelligence Threats to Elections Task Force. The task force is chaired by the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), a signals intelligence agency, and includes the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP and Global Affairs Canada. The briefings are limited to a handful of political party representatives who hold a valid Canadian government security clearance. The briefings occur in a secure facility and no documents can be removed from the briefing room. CSE has issued two reports warning that it is “very likely” that Canadian voters will encounter foreign cyber interference ahead of, and during, the 2019 general election. In a statement released Wednesday evening, CSE said that remains its position.

Estonia: IT minister convenes inaugural e-voting working group | ERR

Minister for Foreign Trade and Information Technology Kert Kingo (EKRE) is convening an e-voting working group for the first time on Thursday. Kingo says that the group’s main aim is to assess the effectiveness of Estonia’s e-voting system in the light of both cybersecurity concerns, and electoral regulations, ERR’s online news in Estonian reports. Tarvi Martens, one of the people behind the e-voting system, has said he regards the move as a political statement. Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) members have in the past been critical of e-voting, principally on security issues. For instance, following the 2017 municipal elections, the party mounted an appeal to the Electoral Committee, questioning why the e-vote had gone ahead in October of that year, despite a recently-detected security risk that could have potentially affected up to quarter of a million Estonian ID cards.

Switzerland: Control-Alt-Delete? Swiss government puts the brakes on e-voting | James Walker/The Daily Swig

The Swiss Federal Council has suspended its plans to bring electronic voting (e-voting) into regular operation in Switzerland. Concerns surrounding the security and integrity of one online voting system were cited among the reasons for the U-turn. In December 2018, the Federal Council launched a consultation into proposed amendments to Switzerland’s Political Rights Act that would effectively make e-voting a third regular voting channel, alongside in-person and postal votes. This consultation is now over, and although a “clear majority” of the cantons and political parties were said to support the introduction of e-voting in principle, the Federal Council said it has decided to “provisionally forgo” the introduction into regular operation. “The political parties which support e-voting in principle consider that now is not the right time to take that step,” a statement reads. “The Federal Council has therefore decided not to proceed with the partial revision of the Political Rights Act at the present time.”

National: Will hacked voting machines decide the 2020 election? | Andrew Eversden/Fifth Domain

Cybersecurity professionals are concerned about foreign cyber operations and vulnerabilities in voting machines as the days tick down to the first 2020 primaries in February. According to a new survey of 345 cybersecurity professionals by Black Hat USA, 63 percent of respondents said that the hacking of voting machines in the next election is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to have a “significant impact” on election results. U.S. government leaders, however, stress that they have prioritized the security of election systems, with one senior administration official on a June 24 press call referring to the defense against hacking of election infrastructure “our highest priority.” “We do believe that the 2020 elections are a potential target for state and non-state cyber actors and we continue to observe unknown actors attempt suspicious and malicious activity against internet-connected infrastructure periodically,” a senior intelligence official said.

National: US election security official highlights email threat | Morgan Lee/Associated Press

Beware the phishing attempts. An election security official with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Tuesday warned top state election officials nationwide to safeguard against fraudulent emails targeting state and local election workers. The emails appear as if they come from a legitimate source and contain links that, if clicked, can open up election data systems to manipulation or attacks. Geoff Hale, director of the department’s Election Security Initiative, told a gathering of secretaries of state that the nation’s decentralized voting systems remain especially vulnerable to emails that can trick unsuspecting workers into providing access to elections databases. “We know that phishing is how a significant number of state and local government networks become exploited,” Hale told scores of secretaries of state gathered in the New Mexico capital city. “Understanding your organization’s susceptibility to phishing is one of the biggest things you can do.”

National: New study shows Russian propaganda may really have helped Trump | Ken Dilanian/NBC

President Donald Trump and his allies have long insisted that Russian’s 2016 propaganda campaign on social media had no impact on the presidential election. A new statistical analysis says it may well have. The study, by researchers at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, does not prove that Russian interference swung the election to Trump. But it demonstrates that Trump’s gains in popularity during the 2016 campaign correlated closely with high levels of social media activity by the Russian trolls and bots of the Internet Research Agency, a key weapon in the Russian attack. “Our results show that the weeks when Russian trolls were accumulating likes and retweets on Twitter, that activity reliably foreshadowed gains for Trump in the opinion polls,” wrote Damian Ruck, the study’s lead researcher, in an article explaining his findings. The study found that every 25,000 re-tweets by accounts connected to the IRA predicted a 1 percent increase in opinion polls for Trump. In an interview with NBC News, Ruck said the research suggests that Russian trolls helped shift U.S public opinion in Trump’s favor. As to whether it affected the outcome of the election: “The answer is that we still don’t know, but we can’t rule it out.” Given that the election turned on 75,000 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, “it is a prospect that should be taken seriously,” Ruck wrote, adding that more study was needed in those swing states.

National: DOD’s cyber policy deputy clarifies homeland support role | Lauren C. Williams/FCW

The Defense Department is settling into its support role when it comes to defending national infrastructure from cyberattacks. B. Edwin Wilson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy, said during a panel talk at the Defense One Tech Summit June 27 that DOD doesn’t replace Homeland Security but has a clear, firm role in relaying intelligence and providing support during elections. “The department does have a role in the defense of the homeland,” Wilson said. “We’re not trying to do DHS’ job … we’re here to support” in areas such as the midterm elections. He added that while DHS’ primary role is securing election infrastructure, DOD shares intelligence on threats to it and help update sensors to compromised systems. “We want to bring the weight, the scale, the scope of the Department of Defense to be able to defend the homeland, our critical infrastructure, and key national interests,” he said.

National: On election security, these members bring a fresh(man) take | Tami Abdollah/Daily Journal

For the past eight weeks, seven freshman members of Congress have quietly met each Monday in a spare House conference room to tackle a problem they feel their more senior colleagues haven’t done enough to address: election security. The six Democrats and one Republican call themselves Task Force Sentry, a title meant to signal their focus on crafting legislation to keep foreign adversaries from interfering with the U.S. political system. They bring a variety of backgrounds to the table, including some with experience in the CIA, military and the technology field. “We’re drawing a line in the sand,” said Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Virginia, a former Central Intelligence Agency operations officer. “We’re standing watch, we’ve been attacked, and a sentry stands watch to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Editorials: The U.S. isn’t prepared to fend off foreign meddling in 2020. We need a national strategy | Casey Corcoran, Bo Julie Crowley and Raina Davis/Los Angeles Times

Russia’s 2016 election interference operation was a clumsy collection of fake memes and leaked emails. Still, it divided American society, eroded trust in national institutions and caught Washington flat-footed. A new wave of sophisticated, artificial-intelligence-enabled influence campaigns is surely headed our way in 2020, yet the United States is nowhere near ready. Continued division over the meaning of meddling in 2016 must not eclipse what should be a clear bipartisan priority — a national strategy to combat malicious foreign influence. The tip of the influence operations spear is found in the Asia-Pacific region, yet few are paying attention. Working with the Defending Digital Democracy project at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, we conducted more than 30 interviews with government officials, journalists and civil society members in Taiwan and found that Taiwanese society is saturated with Chinese disinformation and influence.

Editorials: Election security: The dire issue the Democrats barely mentioned | Dick Polman/WHYY

How was it possible that 20 Democrats, vying to appear on the 2020 ballot, debated last week for four hours without ever assailing the Republicans’ steadfast refusal to protect the 2020 ballot from Russian interference? Didn’t that dire issue warrant at least a few substantive minutes? Mitch McConnell, the GOP Senate leader who’s seemingly determined to do Vladimir Putin’s bidding, continues to block all Democratic reform efforts — including a requirement that all states use backup paper ballots to thwart a cyber-invasion (New Jersey and Delaware don’t have them, nor do most Pennsylvania jurisdictions — although all three states are moving towards buying new voting machines). Candidate Amy Klobuchar, a paper-ballot reformer, zinged McConnell in a random sentence, entrepreneur Andrew Yang said the Russians “have been hacking our democracy successfully and they’ve been laughing their asses off,” and Bill de Blasio said, “we need to stop them” — but you’d have to scour the transcripts with a magnifying glass to find much more. Elizabeth Warren unveiled an election security plan early last week, but, during the debate, she never mentioned it.

California: Russian hackers haunt San Diego Electronic Poll Book | Matt Potter/San Diego Reader

It’s being pitched as the latest voting reform elixir, widely adopted by counties across the country, but a call for proposals to create and operate a so-called electronic voting book system for the San Diego County Registrar of Voters comes amidst rising questions about costs, reliability, and security against Russian hackers. “The Electronic Poll Book system eliminates manual voter lookup, promoting shorter check-in queues with better and immediate alerts for staff or voter guidance,” says the county’s June 26 request for proposals, kicking off a solicitation for services from would-be vendors set to close July 25. “The Electronic Poll Book system will decrease the time it takes to manually complete the election canvass while using fewer resources,” per the document. “As the voter roster increases, the Electronic Poll Book system shall scale up. This allows the County to meet a growing base without impacting the voting experience.” But as with all such outsourcing, the devil is in the details, heavily dependent on the good faith and integrity of vendors, and experiences elsewhere have flashed repeated warnings about the cutting-edge systems.

Michigan: 3 ways Michigan elections remain vulnerable — and what the state can do about it | Riley Beggin/Bridge Magazine

Around 50 elections officials and analysts met at an outpost of the Lansing City Clerk’s office in June, eagerly awaiting the day’s activity: Piloting a relatively new method for ensuring accurate election results. The volunteers — from as near as Delta Township and as far as California — were there to learn an election audit method considered the “gold standard” for verifying votes as the nation barrels toward its first presidential election following widespread Russian tampering in 2016. The method is known as a risk-limiting audit, which essentially involves hand-counting a statistically significant sample of ballots to be confident election results are accurate. A spokesman for the Michigan Secretary of State said it’s one of a handful of techniques the state is testing ahead of the 2020 statewide election, when it will be required to audit elections across the state — a legacy of Proposal 3, the citizen-initiated constitutional amendment passed last November. The fact that the state is required to audit is a new phenomenon; before the amendment passed last fall, the state audited a fixed percentage of precincts after each election but wasn’t bound by law to do so. And that change is good news, elections security experts told Bridge. A robust post-election audit is one of the best ways the state can make sure state elections are protected against hacking or manipulation by foreign or domestic adversaries.

Pennsylvania: Politics of elections snares Pennsylvania voting-machine aid | Marc Levy/The Associated Press

The fate of legislation to help Pennsylvania’s counties afford new voting machines before next year’s election is in doubt after getting wrapped up in the politics of voting and election laws. Gov. Tom Wolf said Monday that he will decide later in the week whether to sign or veto the bill, despite the Democrat’s support for the $90 million it carries in borrowing authority to help counties pay for new machines. Hours before the bill passed the Republican-controlled Legislature last week, Republicans unveiled the borrowing provision and attached it to a hodge-podge of changes to election laws. One of those provisions eliminates the single ballot option for voters to select a straight-party ticket in elections, prompting calls from Democrats to veto it. Democrats said it came out of the blue and had never been studied by the committee. Republicans characterized the change as a bipartisan effort to encourage voters to vote for candidates, not parties. Democrats scrambled to see if Wolf had supported it and decried it as a setback to voting access and the civil rights of minorities that would effectively help down-ballot Republican candidates. It is among a couple things in the bill that Wolf said he didn’t like.

Canada: Spy Agency Says Voters Are Being Targeted By Foreign Influence Campaigns | BuzzFeed and the Toronto Star

Canada’s intelligence community has identified foreign actors attempting to directly influence the upcoming federal election campaign, a Toronto Star and BuzzFeed News investigation has learned. The Communications Security Establishment (CSE), the country’s cyber defence agency, has briefed senior political staff of one federal party about “covert and overt” attempts to influence the Oct. 21 federal election. Canada’s domestic spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), also said Tuesday that “threat actors” are trying to influence Canadian citizens, although the agency tied it to an attack on “democratic institutions” rather than the election specifically. The agencies would not reveal the exact nature of the attempts to influence but said the scope of “foreign interference activities can be broad,” including state-sponsored or influenced media, hacking, and traditional spy operations. “Threat actors are seeking to influence the Canadian public and interfere with Canada’s democratic institutions and processes,” wrote Tahera Mufti, a spokesperson for CSIS, in an emailed statement.

India: Supreme Court seeks Election Commission response on electronic voting machine malfunction complaint | Outlook