National: In Industry First, Voting Machine Company to Publish Source Code | WIRED

Sequoia Voting Systems plans to publicly release the source code for its new optical scan voting system, the company announced Tuesday — a remarkable reversal for a voting machine maker long criticized for resisting public examination of its proprietary systems. The company’s new public source optical-scan voting system, called Frontier Election System, will be submitted for federal certification and testing in the first quarter of next year. The code will be released for public review in November, the company said, on its web site. Sequoia’s proprietary, closed systems are currently used in 16 states and the District of Columbia. The announcement comes five days after a non-profit foundation announced the release of its open-source election software for public review. Sequoia spokeswoman Michelle Shafer says the timing of its release is unrelated to the foundation’s announcement. … Sequoia in fact has been a champion of security through obscurity since it’s been selling voting systems. The company has long had a reputation for vigorously fighting any efforts by academics, voting activists and others to examine the source code in its proprietary systems, and even threatened to sue Princeton University computer scientists if they disclosed anything learned from a court-ordered review of its software.

National: Microsoft reports hundreds of election-related cyber probes | Associated Press

Tech giant Microsoft says it has detected more than 740 infiltration attempts by nation-state actors in the past year targeting U.S.-based political parties, campaigns and other democracy-focused organizations including think tanks and other nonprofits. However a company spokeswoman would not name or further characterize the targets. All of them subscribe to Microsoft’s year-old AccountGuard service, which provides free cyberthreat detection to candidates, campaigns and other mostly election-related groups. Microsoft did not say how many infiltration attempts were successful but noted in a blog post Wednesday that such targeting similarly occurred in the early stages of the 2016 and 2018 elections. “Cyberattacks continue to be a significant tool and weapon wielded in cyberspace,” Microsoft said. “In some instances, those attacks appear to be related to ongoing efforts to attack the democratic process. A year ago, Microsoft said it had detected attempts to infiltrate the networks of U.S. senatorial candidates and think tanks. “As we head into the 2020 elections, given both the broad reliance on cyberattacks by nation-states and the use of cyberattacks to specifically target democratic processes, we anticipate that we will see attacks targeting U.S. election systems, political campaigns or NGOs that work closely with campaigns,” Microsoft said.