National: The government’s relationship with ethical hackers has improved, security experts say | Joseph Marks/The Washington Post

The relationship between ethical hackers and the federal government is better now than it was in 2013, when then-National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander first spoke at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference — not long after Edward Snowden revealed the government’s sweeping surveillance programs. That’s the conclusion of 72 percent of experts who responded to an informal survey by The Cybersecurity 202 before the kickoff of this year’s conference in Las Vegas. The experts are part of the The Network, an ongoing survey of more than 100 cybersecurity experts from government, academia and the private sector. (You can see the full list of experts here. Some were granted anonymity in exchange for their participation.) When Alexander spoke in 2013, many security researchers were enraged about the newly disclosed surveillance programs, which they said ran roughshod over Americans’ privacy rights and made their jobs harder. Alexander’s defense of the programs fell especially flat, many survey respondents said, since at that time the U.S. government often failed to distinguish between ethical hackers, who tried to make the Internet safer by finding and patching computer bugs, and criminal hackers who tried to exploit those bugs to steal people’s money and information.

National: Black Hat 2019: What We Expect | Neil J. Rubenking and Max Eddy/PCMag

The annual DEF CON hacking conference started as an accident in 1993, and has been going and growing ever since. Black Hat, launched in 1997 by DEF CON founder Jeff Moss (aka Dark Tangent), is its more formal cousin. To paraphrase a welcome speech by Moss a few years ago, friends said to him, “Hey, why don’t you invite more people, charge them a lot of money, and make them wear suits?” The suits are gone, for the most part, but Black Hat gets bigger every year, with 19,000 attendees last year. Black Hat consists of two very different parts. From Saturday to Tuesday, security experts and aspiring experts pay thousands of dollars to participate in training sessions intended to hone their skills in a wide range of security tasks. The press is not invited. On Wednesday and Thursday, the conference switches to briefings, where security experts and academics from all over the world share their latest discoveries, new vulnerabilities, and cutting-edge research.

National: Def Con draws election officials to Las Vegas in effort to combat hackers | Miranda Willson/Las Vegas Sun

Ahead of the annual hacker and cybersecurity conference Def Con in Las Vegas this weekend, organizers anticipate that the part of the event devoted to election security will entice more local, state and federal election officials than ever before. Drawing tens of thousands of hackers, researchers, lawyers and others interested in cybersecurity every year to Las Vegas, Def Con has included a so-called “Voting Village” in its weekend-long programming for the past three years to address election security and how to protect elections from hacking. This is the first time that Def Con explicitly invited local and state election officials to attend, and many seem to be taking advantage of the opportunity, said Harri Hursti, co-founder of the Voting Village and founder of computer and network security company Nordic Innovation Labs. “We never intended this to be a main or big thing. It became a big thing because of popular demand,” Hursti said. Among those attending the conference are representatives from the Clark County Election Department and the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office.

National: Key House Republican demands answers on federal election security efforts | Maggie Miller/The Hill

Illinois Rep. Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, demanded answers from the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) on Monday regarding election security oversight issues. In a letter to the EAC, Davis posed a series of questions, citing the committee “Majority’s inadequate oversight of your Commission” during an EAC oversight hearing on May and the recent testimony by former special counsel Robert Mueller as key factors in sending the letter.  “I remain committed to ensuring that local election officials have every resource they need to provide for a secure election in 2020,” Davis wrote. “Effective and focused oversight over the EAC is critically important in this mission.” Questions included what steps the EAC is taking to ensure there is a plan in place to coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security in the event of a threat to election infrastructure in 2020, how the EAC is communicating its activities to the public, and details around the new Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines 2.0, which are a national voluntary set of standards for voting systems. Davis gave the EAC until Sept. 2 to respond. A spokesperson for the EAC told The Hill the commission has “received the letter and will respond to Congress within the agreed upon deadline.”

National: Judge signals interest in removing Mueller report redactions | Darren Samuelsohn/Politico

A federal judge signaled Monday he’s considering removing the Mueller report’s redactions. During more than two hours of oral arguments in Washington, District Judge Reggie Walton appeared on several occasions to side with attorneys for BuzzFeed and the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center, which are seeking to remove the black bars covering nearly 1,000 items in former special counsel Robert Mueller’s final 448-page final report. Walton didn’t issue an opinion from the bench on the case, which centers on a pair of consolidated lawsuits filed against the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act. But the judge, an appointee of President George W. Bush, sounded increasingly skeptical of the government’s arguments pressing him to leave the redactions untouched. “That’s what open government is about,” Walton said during one exchange, citing the resolution of a 2008 sex crimes case against financier Jeffrey Epstein as an example of how obfuscating the reasons behind not prosecuting high-profile people generates public distrust in the country’s criminal justice system.

National: Bipartisan Agreement on Election Security—And a Partisan Fight Anyway | Scott R. Anderson, Eugenia Lostri, Quinta Jurecic, Margaret Taylor/Lawfare

The good news is that national security bipartisanship in Congress lives. The bad news is that the only place it lives is in the pages of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian election interference. The report, released on July 25, offers a thorough—if often redacted—assessment of Russian threats against U.S. voting infrastructure in 2016. It paints an alarming picture of the scope and scale of Russia’s efforts and an equally alarming picture of the degree of vulnerability that persists in U.S. election systems heading into the 2020 election. While it describes no evidence of vote tallies being manipulated or votes being changed, it does describe how “Russian government-affiliated cyber actors conducted an unprecedented level of activity against state election infrastructure in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. elections.” The report is a serious work and reflects a level of bipartisan cooperation that is vanishingly rare in Washington these days. The committee and its staff should be commended for that. The problem is that while both sides appear to agree on the nature of the threat, Republicans and Democrats remain sharply divided over what, if anything, to do about it. And that division became painfully apparent the very day the committee released the report.

National: Former DHS, intelligence leaders launch group to protect presidential campaigns from foreign interference | Maggie Miller/The Hill

Two former Homeland Security secretaries, along with other former top intelligence officials, launched a non-profit group on Tuesday intended to protect presidential campaigns from foreign interference, such as cyber attacks, at no cost. The new U.S. CyberDome group’s Board of Advisors will be chaired by former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson, who served under former President Obama. Other members of the board will include former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff, who served under President George W. Bush, former CIA Director Michael Morell, former Director of National Intelligence Lt. Gen. James Clapper, and Brig. Gen. Francis Taylor, the former DHS under secretary of Intelligence and Analysis. The former leaders put together the organization due to alarm over how exposed political campaigns were to cyber interference and the lack of protection available to campaigns and voters to protect against these threats. It will work with charities and other donors to provide funding for cyber protections for presidential campaigns.

National: Voting machines run on antiquated operating systems | Grant Gross/Washington Examiner

As the presidential election nears, lawmakers and security experts are raising questions about the security of electronic voting machines used in many parts of the country. The latest concerns focus on devices running Windows 7 and other older operating systems. The Associated Press reports that the “vast majority” of the nation’s 10,000 election jurisdictions use Windows 7 or older operating systems to create ballots, program voting machines, tally votes, and report counts. … Meanwhile, some election security experts say the use of old operating systems is only one concern of many. Electronic voting machines are vulnerable to security risks, claimed Marian Schneider, president of Verified Voting, a group pushing for paper audits of electronic voting machines.

“Software can present risks,” she said. “This is a software issue.”

Electronic voting machines should undergo regular security audits, suggested Jamie Cambell, a security consultant and founder of GoBestVPN, which is a site that reviews virtual private networks. Those security audits should be open-sourced so that multiple security experts can review them, he recommended.

“There are many things that can make electronic voting machines insecure,” Cambell added. “It’s not just the machines or operating systems. It can be the way that the machines store and transmit the data.”

Editorials: Mitch McConnell Mislabeled Election Security as a ‘Wish List of the Left.’ Period. | Ali Javery & Edgardo Cortés/Rewire.News

In the height of one of the most politicized times in U.S. history, election security is an issue that should not be partisan. But that’s how U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)—who continues to block election security efforts from a vote—framed the issue in a recent speech from the Senate floor. “Make no mistake—many of the proposals labeled by Democrats to be election security are measures, in fact, for election reform that are part of the wish list of the left,” McConnell said. Eligible voters already face hurdles to making their voices heard at the ballot box, including outdated voter rolls and difficultly accessing the polls. The added fear of foreign interference and tampering in our elections only add to the fear that Americans feel about voting. In an effort to ease that anxiety, states across the country have implemented election security reforms through bipartisan efforts. We’ve seen several prominent Republicans support or sign into law voting reforms that provide greater election security within their states. In the past five years alone, elected officials from states like Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Alaska have supported legislation or ballot measures to push automatic voter registration, among other voting reforms.

Georgia: Georgia awards voting contract before testing finished | Mark Niesse/The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Georgia’s new voting machines haven’t yet passed state tests of their accuracy, reliability and security, a required step before they can be used in elections. The testing of Dominion Voting System’s equipment is expected to be completed soon, said Georgia Secretary of State spokeswoman Tess Hammock on Monday. Dominion’s voting system, which combines touchscreen voting machines and paper ballots, already received federal certification in January.Until the state’s own tests are completed, it’s unknown whether there are any potential problems with Georgia’s new voting system that need to be corrected.Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced last week that Dominion won a $107 million contract to provide voting equipment to the state’s 7 million registered voters. State rules require voting systems to complete testing and be certified by the secretary of state before they can be put into service.

Montana: After elections administrators voice concern, new voter system won’t roll out until 2021 | Holly K. Michels/The Missoulian

The secretary of state is backing away from plans to implement a new election system for Montana before 2020 after elections administrators around the state raised concerns about the aggressive timeline. In a July 24 letter to the head of the Montana Association of Clerks and Recorders, Secretary of State Corey Stapleton wrote that “it does not appear to me that we will be able to implement a new voter registration system this year.” County elections administrators had previously told Stapleton they had “grave concerns” over a plan to replace the existing MontanaVotes system with a new ElectMT system before 2020, as reported by the Montana Free Press. The 2020 elections are expected to see the highest voter turnout in Montana history — it’s a presidential election year, with two federal offices and all the statewide elected officials up for election, plus other state-level, legislative and local races, and ballot initiatives. “The whole association is extremely excited with the decision to wait and not roll it out in the 2020 election,” said Montana Association of Clerks and Recorders President Stephanie Verhasselt, who is the Richland County clerk and recorder. “We do believe when the new system comes out, once we get it working and everyone trained, I think it will have a lot of features we like.”

Nevada: Cybersecurity experts from around the world descend on Las Vegas for Black Hat 2019 | KVVU

Cellphones, cars, even your refrigerator. They’re all “smart.” But so are some criminals who want to hack into those smart systems. That’s why cybersecurity experts from around the world are in Las Vegas this week. They’re not here to hack your phone or your credit card (hopefully). They’re learning how to stop the bad guys. “It’s become summer camp for hackers in the desert,” said Black Hat General Manager Steve Wylie. For the 23rd year, camp is in session. With new technology comes new vulnerabilities. “There’s tremendous value from understanding how a bad guy might get in. So if we can reverse engineer that and understand how to better protect ourselves and our systems,” said Wylie. Voting machines could be very vulnerable during the 2020 election. Black Hat surveyed cybersecurity experts from around the world. They said there’s a 60% chance the 2020 presidential election will be hacked. “That’s alarming because this is coming from the very people who are protecting those systems in our organizations,” said Wylie.

Editorials: Election security in North Caroliba | Wilkes Journal Patriot

Well before most people seriously imagined the Russians might attempt to interfere with U.S. elections, the N.C. General Assembly passed a law requiring that all voting machines used in the 2020 election and beyond generate a paper record showing how votes were cast. The legislature took this action in 2013 because it recognized security weaknesses in touchscreen voting machines, which provide no paper record of how ballots were cast. This makes the touchscreen systems more vulnerable to outside interference than voting systems with paper ballots. Now, here we are in the summer of 2019 and about one-third of North Carolina’s counties still have these touchscreen-only voting systems that don’t meet the paper ballot requirement enacted in 2013. Mecklenburg and Guilford, two of the state’s most heavily populated counties, are among those still using the touchscreen systems that don’t meet requirements of the law.

Pennsylvania: Lebanon County Commissioners approve USB backup drives for new voting machines | Marylouise Sholly/LebTown

Lebanon County Commissioners approved a request earlier this week by the county’s Director of Elections, Michael Anderson, to purchase 72 USB “thumb drives” as extra security for the scanning devices in the new voting machines to be used during the next election. Thumb drives are devices that can upload and download information from a computer. In July, the county received 100 Express Vote ballot marking devices and 72 DS 200 scanner/tabulators along with election management systems that had been purchased earlier in the year from Election Systems & Software. Total purchase price was $704,932, Anderson said. The first use of these new voting machines will be the elections of Nov. 5, 2019.

Rhode Island: State Rebuilding Central Voter Registration System Ahead of 2020 | GoLocalProv

Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea joined GoLocalProv News Editor Kate Nagle on LIVE where she spoke to the office overseeing the rebuilding of the central voter registration system this year — and why she fears early voting not passing the General Assembly this year will have consequences in 2020. “We are in the process of making sure that our hardware an internet structures are secure — so Stonewall Solutions, I’m proud to say a Rhode Island company from Pawtucket — just won the RFP for rebuilding our central voter registration system, so we are secure to modern-day standards,” said Gorbea. “It was a great program back in 2003 when we first built it but now you know it needs to be upgraded.”

Ukraine: Zelensky’s team working on internet voting in Ukraine | Unian

The team of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is working on a project that will allow Ukrainians to vote online during elections. “We have already ‘The Vote’ project,” Zelensky’s advisor Mykhailo Fedorov said in an interview to Liga.net. According to him, at the first stage, the platform will be used for surveys, thanks to which the president, prime minister and others will learn the real opinion of the population. The identification system in this project is implemented through Mobile ID, electronic signature, BankID. Fedorov assures Ukrainians will be able to vote online in elections in 2024.