National: Just how secure are electronic voting machines? | CNN

It’s no secret, given the hacks that have plagued the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign. But security researchers warn that it’s just the beginning. “There’s not even a doubt in my mind that there are other actors out there that have yet to be found,” Crowdstrike CEO George Kurtz told CNNMoney. “I’m sure there will be other hacks that come out over the course of this election and certainly beyond that.” Kurtz, whose firm was brought in by the DNC to investigate the hack, called the hack a watershed moment. He said Crowdstrike has been fielding calls from Washington as political parties wrap their heads around a new type of threat: Hackers trying to manipulate the U.S. election. Far from Washington, hackers descended on Las Vegas to show off their party tricks at Black Hat, the annual conference that puts security on the frontlines. They hacked cars, ATMs and mobile devices. This year, there was a new addition: a simulated version of a hackable electronic voting machine, assembled by security firm Symantec. Brian Varner, a security researcher at Symantec, said the electronic voting machine is another frontier for hackers.

National: Trump Says the Election Will Be Rigged. In These States, It May Be Impossible to Prove Him Wrong. | Mother Jones

With growing evidence that Russia is meddling in the US presidential election—allegedly by hacking the Democratic National Committee and releasing embarrassing emails—the concern that somebody might try to hack voting machines no longer seems outlandish. And as many as one-fifth of all votes cast in the November election could be particularly vulnerable to interference. … Concerns about the vulnerability of the country’s voting infrastructure are mounting just as Republican nominee Donald Trump has begun talking about howthe election might be rigged against him. The absence of a paper trail on millions of ballots in swing states could give Trump plenty of ammunition for his conspiratorial allegations—and make them virtually impossible to disprove. “You really want to have a baseline of evidence that you can use to demonstrate that the outcome [of an election] was correct,” says Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, which pushes for accurate, transparent, and verifiable elections. “The DNC hack takes this idea out of the realm of the theoretical and into the ‘Oh, this could actually happen.'”

Australia: Census debacle should bring pause in electronic voting moves: expert | Sydney Morning Herald

A leading expert in electronic voting says proposals for an overhaul of Australian elections could be slowed by Tuesday’s census debacle, calling for a parliamentary committee to carefully consider security, verification and capacity as part of any new consideration. Former NSW Electoral Commission director of information and technology Ian Brightwell said the Australian Electoral Commission would have to be prepared to allow significantly increased external scrutiny of its processes and systems if it follows calls by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten for further moves towards electronic voting at federal elections. Responsible for the implementation of the NSW iVote electronic system, used in the 2011 and 2015 state elections, Mr Brightwell has worked for two decades in management of technology in election processes. He said the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ mishandling of the census would be a lesson for the election authorities and politicians, but that public education was needed to build confidence in electronic systems before more people could vote using computers.

National: Widespread Hack of U.S. Voting Machines ‘Highly Unlikely’ | Bloomberg

A majority of U.S. states are planning to conduct their November elections using electronic machines with technology invented when cybersecurity threats did not loom as quite as large as they do now. It seems like an election crisis waiting to happen. But, despite recent hacks of Democratic Party data– and suspicions of Russian government involvement—a widespread attack on electronic voting machines is unlikely, according to people familiar with existing systems. Still, states and Congress should move to upgrade and protect a legion of outdated machines from isolated attacks, they say. … There’s no evidence that a voting machine has been hacked during an election, said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist for the Center for Democracy and Technology, who specializes in voting technology. Although that doesn’t mean a hack couldn’t happen, the wide variety of machines and methods used to vote from precinct to precinct would require an army of people within U.S. borders trying to tamper with machines on a local level, Hall said. “A widespread effect is highly unlikely because the resources required would be very large,” Hall said. “There are attacks you can accomplish from afar for an internet voting system that aren’t possible with the system we have now.” Hall said that doesn’t mean that small-scale electronic voting hacks aren’t a concern. Outdated voting machines are “horrifically insecure,” he said.

National: Will the US elections be hacked? It’s doubtful, but machines could be ‘rigged’ | The Guardian

It’s been a topic of debate ever since hackers – presumably working for Russia – stole thousands of private emails from the Democratic National Committee and leaked them on the net. Could a nation state or other adversary hack our elections and determine the next president of the United States? The answer depends on how they try to go about it, says Avi Rubin, computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University and technical director of the university’s Information Security Institute. Election hacking is highly unlikely, he says. Attackers reaching into the ballot box from thousands of miles away won’t happen, simply because the vast majority of election machines are not connected to the internet. Some 31 states offer voting via internet, email, or fax, but nearly all only allow it as an option for military families and Americans living overseas – a very small percentage of the electorate. Only Alaska allows any voter to cast a ballot across the net, according to Verified Voting. But election rigging is a potential threat, says Rubin. That’s where adversaries attack the electronic voting machines themselves, altering the software inside the machines to favor one candidate. “There are a thousand points of vulnerability,” says Rubin. “Anyone with access to the machines at any stage could attack them.”

National: Hackers Say It Would Be “Too Easy” To Hack The U.S. Elections | BuzzFeed

Before the hacker touched a single key on the electronic voting booth, he already had three or four ideas in mind for how he could manipulate the results. “Just based on the fact that many of these voting machines have been around for years, just based on that I could tell you old vulnerabilities that exist in the system,” Tim Monroe told BuzzFeed News. Monroe, 26, is an independent cybersecurity consultant based in Boston, who says that calling himself a hacker sounds a lot better than his actual title. “Elections are full of opportunities for hackers, and those opportunities just keep getting better as more systems go online. I look at this machine and think, ‘here’s a thing to play with and take apart.’” Monroe wasn’t looking at a machine in a polling station somewhere in the United States, but one set up at Black Hat, an annual conference for the world’s foremost cybersecurity companies to show off their research and remind each other just how vulnerable all online systems are. This year, as an alleged Russian hack infiltrating the emails of top Democratic Party officials dominated news coverage in the weeks ahead of the conference, the question of hackers meddling in the upcoming US election was a constant source of speculation.

National: Could the Presidential Election Be Stolen? | Newsweek

America’s election is at risk of being stolen: That, in essence, is what some news reports, as well as Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his allies, have been suggesting lately. … Election integrity and cybersecurity experts say there are real security vulnerabilities in America’s election system—or, more accurately, systems, as there are more than 9,000 separate state and local jurisdictions that conduct elections around the country. A number of states and municipalities continue to use insecure electronic and/or online voting technologies, despite years of warnings that these systems have bugs and poor security. It’s also true that a motivated individual could, in theory, go to the polls and pretend he or she is someone else, or lie on an absentee ballot. There are, however, two important caveats. One: Evidence of outright voter fraud of the sort Trump is warning about is extremely rare. Two: Even if a malevolent actor did succeed in meddling with an election—either by hacking into an electronic system or via lower-tech identity fraud—that doesn’t mean he or she could affect the outcome. Doing so would be extremely difficult in large part because of how fragmented the U.S. voting system is. … Pam Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonprofit group that advocates for accurate and fair elections, says Ohio and Florida, in particular, have “been making all the moves in the right direction” after grappling with major voting crises last decade. Many counties in Ohio still use electronic voting machines, which provide the potential for hacking. But they require physical paper records of voters’ ballots, known as voter verifiable paper audit trails, which allow voters to confirm their votes were recorded correctly and also allow election officials to audit the vote tallies.

Minnesota: After DNC hack, Minnesota braces for digital threat to election | Minneapolis Star Tribune

The list of precautions the state has taken to keep computer hackers from hijacking the November election stretches to two single-spaced pages: a cyber security team, a new outside election consultant and an encrypted internet transmission system. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon and his staff say they feel confident that they have taken every reasonable step to prevent hackers from upending the election. Yet, memories of a hack in 2009 that shut down the Secretary of State’s business website never quite fade. And now a foreign-led hack of Democratic National Committee computers is reigniting previous concerns about the upcoming election. “If the [voting] system is connected to the internet or if the system is connected to a network that’s connected to the internet, there’s a cascading risk,” said Mike Johnson, who spent 15 years directing cyber security for Bremer Bank and now teaches at the University of Minnesota’s Technological Leadership Institute. Across the country, in the aftermath of the extraordinary attack on the DNC computers, cyber security experts are newly assessing the vulnerability of the nation’s voting system. Some say the technological weaknesses are significant enough to disrupt the presidential election.

Australia: NSW’s e-Voting system under fire | Computerworld

In the aftermath of the 2 July federal election, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and opposition leader Bill Shorten both indicated support for the potential use of eVoting to avoid drawn-out post-election ballot counting. However, the eVoting platform used in Australia’s most populous state — New South Wales’ iVote system — has again come under fire. The iVote system supports telephone and Internet-based voting in the state. The current version of iVote was produced by Scytl in partnership with the NSW Electoral Commission (NSWEC) and used in the 2015 state election. The robustness, privacy and verification method of the system have been questioned by two university researchers, one of whom was previously instrumental in uncovering a security vulnerability in iVote.

National: U.S. Seeks to Protect Voting System Against Cyberattacks | The New York Times

The Obama administration is weighing new steps to bolster the security of the United States’ voting process against cyberthreats, including whether to designate the electronic ballot-casting system for November’s elections as “critical infrastructure,” Jeh Johnson, the secretary of Homeland Security, said on Wednesday. In the wake of hacks that infiltrated Democratic campaign computer systems, Mr. Johnson said he was conducting high-level discussions about “election cybersecurity,” a vastly complex effort given that there are 9,000 jurisdictions in the United States that have a hand in carrying out the balloting, many of them with different ways of collecting, tallying and reporting votes. “We should carefully consider whether our election system, our election process is critical infrastructure, like the financial sector, like the power grid,” Mr. Johnson told reporters at a breakfast in Washington. “There’s a vital national interest in our electoral process.” A national commission created as part of a voting overhaul enacted in 2002 in response to the controversy surrounding the 2000 presidential election “raised the bar” on security, Mr. Johnson said. “But there is more to do,” he added. “The nature of cyberthreats has evolved.” Mr. Johnson said that he was considering communicating with state and local election officials across the country in the coming weeks to inform them about “best practices” to guard against cyberintrusions, and that longer-term investments would probably have to be made to secure the voting process.

National: What the DNC Hack Says about Cyber-Based Threats to Democracy | MIT Technology Review

It’s widely believed that Russian hackers were behind the recent attack on the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail servers. While the consequences of the attack for this year’s presidential election remain to be seen, it’s not hard to imagine how hackers could influence or disrupt our elections—and that could undermine our national stability and security. That’s why the government should take the advice of security experts who say it must intervene to protect the voting system from cyberthreats. As Bruce Schneier, a technologist and lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, argued recently in the Washington Post, the government should act quickly in the wake of the DNC hack. “If foreign governments learn they can influence our elections with impunity,” he wrote, “this opens the door to future manipulations, both document thefts and dumps like this one that we see and more subtle manipulations that we don’t see.”

National: DHS Preps Advice to Help Election Officials Protect Electronic Voting Machines from Cyberattack | Government Technology

The Department of Homeland Security is preparing advice for election officials to better protect electronic voting machines, online ballots and vote counts from hackers, following the high-profile breach of Democratic National Committee emails, the head of the department said Wednesday. “We are actively thinking about election cyber security right now,” Jeh Johnson said at a breakfast with reporters in Washington hosted by the Christian Science Monitor. Any effort to guard election computers from being breached is complicated by the fact that there are more than 9,000 different voting jurisdictions in the U.S., and each has its own leadership and way of operating, he said. “There are some short-term and long-term things I think we should do to bolster the cyber security around the election process,” Johnson said, stopping short of detailing what kinds of weaknesses hackers could find to influence election results. “There are various different points in the process we have to be concerned about,” he said.

National: Homeland Security sending advice to election officials to protect voting machines from cyberattack | Los Angeles Times

The Department of Homeland Security is preparing advice for election officials to better protect electronic voting machines, online ballots and vote counts from hackers, following the high-profile breach of Democratic National Committee emails, the head of the department said Wednesday. “We are actively thinking about election cyber security right now,” Jeh Johnson said at a breakfast…

National: US Cyber Pros: Hackers Could Hit Electronic Voting Machines Next | VoA News

U.S. cyber security professionals say suspected foreign hackers who recently attacked computer systems of the Democratic Party could do something even more sinister in the future. The cyber pros, who appeared on this week’s Hashtag VOA program, said U.S. electronic voting systems are likely to be among the next targets. When the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks published leaked emails of the U.S. Democratic National Committee last month, it caused major embarrassment to the party, and forced U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to quit her position as the DNC chairperson. Cybersecurity analyst Richard Forno said that outcome shows foreign hackers can achieve political goals and incentivizes them to escalate their attacks.

Editorials: Election security as a national security issue | Dan Wallach/Freedom to Tinker

We recently learned that Russian state actors may have been responsible for the DNC emails recently leaked to Wikileaks. As we understand the facts, the Democratic National Committee’s email system was hacked. Earlier this spring, once they became aware of the hack, the DNC hired Crowdstrike, an incident response firm. The New York Times reports: Preliminary conclusions were discussed last week at a weekly cyberintelligence meeting for senior officials. The Crowdstrike report, supported by several other firms that have examined the same bits of code and telltale “metadata” left on documents that were released before WikiLeaks’ publication of the larger trove, concludes that the Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B., entered the committee’s networks last summer. President Obama added that “on a regular basis, [the Russians] try to influence elections in Europe.” For the sake of this blog piece, and it’s not really a stretch, let’s take it as a given that foreign nation-state actors including Russia have a large interest in the outcome of U.S. elections and are willing to take all sorts of unseemly steps to influence what happens here. Let’s take it as a given that this is undesirable and talk about how we might stop it.

National: How Hackers Could Destroy Election Day | The Daily Beast

Stealing and leaking emails from the Democratic National Committee could be just the start. Hacking the presidential election itself could be next, a bipartisan group of former intelligence and security officials recently warned. Whomever was behind the DNC hack also could target voting machines and the systems for tabulating votes, which are dangerously insecure. “Election officials at every level of government should take this lesson to heart: our electoral process could be a target for reckless foreign governments and terrorist groups,” wrote 31 members of the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group, which includes a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a former secretary of Homeland Security. That echoes warnings computer security experts have been sounding for more than a decade: that the system for casting and counting votes in this country is also ripe for mischief. … Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia allow military personnel and overseas voters to return their ballots electronically, according to Verified Voting, a non-profit group that advocates transparency and security in U.S. elections. “The election official on the receiving end has no way to know if the voted ballot she received matches the one the voter originally sent,” the group warns. Some ballots are sent through online portals, which exposes the voting system to the internet. And that’s one of the most dangerous things elections officials can do, because it provides a remote point of access for hackers into the election system.

National: Russia, the DNC Hack, and the Future of Democracy | The Atlantic

Analysts largely agree that the hacking of various arms of the Democratic Party, and the release of hacked emails that deepened divisions within the party just ahead of its presidential convention, is a big deal. But there’s less agreement about whether what we’re witnessing is fundamentally old or new. The answer to that question could shape not just the Obama administration’s response to the hack, but international norms on the limits to foreign influence in democratic elections. Put simply: If, as some reckon, Russian intelligence agencies spied on the Democratic Party and then shared looted documents with WikiLeaks in order to intervene in the U.S. election, can that be tolerated? So far, only anonymous U.S. officials and private cybersecurity companies have designated Russia as the prime suspect in the hack. The U.S. government has yet to publicly accuse the Russian government of orchestrating the breach, let alone the leaks, and Russian officials have denied any involvement in the episode. Nevertheless, some argue that the Kremlin appears to have merely extended to America a reinvented Soviet tactic that it has deployed for years at home and across Europe: Using a variety of measures—including the collection and dissemination of compromising information and disinformation—to meddle in politics, discredit the political systems of rival countries, and sow doubt, discord, and disarray.

Editorials: How vulnerable to hacking is the US election cyber infrastructure? | Richard Forno/The Conversation

Following the hack of Democratic National Committee emails and reports of a new cyberattack against the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, worries abound that foreign nations may be clandestinely involved in the 2016 American presidential campaign. Allegations swirl that Russia, under the direction of President Vladimir Putin, is secretly working to undermine the U.S. Democratic Party. The apparent logic is that a Donald Trump presidency would result in more pro-Russian policies. At the moment, the FBI is investigating, but no U.S. government agency has yet made a formal accusation. The Republican nominee added unprecedented fuel to the fire by encouraging Russia to “find” and release Hillary Clinton’s missing emails from her time as secretary of state. Trump’s comments drew sharp rebuke from the media and politicians on all sides. Some suggested that by soliciting a foreign power to intervene in domestic politics, his musings bordered on criminality or treason. Trump backtracked, saying his comments were “sarcastic,” implying they’re not to be taken seriously.

Editorials: Paper ballots still safer than digital vote | The Courier-Mail

It took a month but we got there. Counting for the House of Reps has finished and the last seat, Herbert in north Queensland, has finally been decided. But keyboard critics are already pouncing. Not on Labor or the LNP but on the very system itself. Here we are in 2016, they say, 20 years after the internet entered our lives, and we’re still voting with pencil and paper. We wait for weeks for something a machine could do in seconds. Online voting could do away with postal and absentee votes and the lost ballots that forced a re-run of the 2013 West Australian Senate poll could be avoided. If we can enrol to vote, study and transfer money electronically, surely we can trust online ballots? No, we can’t.

National: Hacking An Election: Why It’s Not As Far-Fetched As You Might Think | NPR

The recent hacking of Democratic Party databases — and strong suspicions that the Russian government is involved — have led to new fears that America’s voting systems are vulnerable to attack and that an outsider could try to disrupt the upcoming elections. A cyberattack on U.S. elections isn’t as far-fetched as you might think. Just a week and a half ago, Illinois election officials shut down that state’s voter registration database after discovering it had been hacked. In June, Arizona took its voter registration system offline after the FBI warned it too might have been hacked, although no evidence of that was found. In May, security analyst David Levin was arrested after he gained access to the Lee County, Fla., elections website. Levin said in a YouTube video he was only trying to show how vulnerable the system was: “Yeah, you could be in Siberia and still perform the attack that I performed on the local supervisor of election website. So this is very important.” The county says the problems were later fixed.

National: The Same Russian Hackers Hit the DNC and the DCCC, Security Firms Say | Foreign Policy

Cybersecurity companies studying the breach of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have found evidence indicating that the same group of Russian hackers breached both groups’ computer systems. According to ThreatConnect and Fidelis Cybersecurity, two security firms that have been studying the activities of a hacker group dubbed Cozy Bear, hackers from that organization used some of the same internet infrastructure to attack the two Democratic groups. Cozy Bear hackers utilized an email address identified by German intelligence as one used by the group to register an internet domain that was then used in the attack on the DCCC. According to Justin Harvey, the chief security officer at Fidelis, the finding provides 90 percent certainty that hackers working on behalf of Russian intelligence carried out both the DNC and the DCCC attack.

Russia: Hey, don’t blame us, 20 of our government organizations were hacked too | Computerworld

The FBI is investigating a previously unreported cyberattack on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC); like the earlier Democratic National Committee (DNC) breach, Russia denied any involvement. Russia previously called claims that it was behind the DNC hack and trying to influence the presidential election “absurd.” It has repeatedly “denounced the ‘poisonous anti-Russian’ rhetoric coming out of Washington.” Regarding the DCCC attack, a Kremlin spokesman told Reuters, “We don’t see the point any more in repeating yet again that this is silliness.” Then, days after news about the DCCC hack broke, Russia claimed that someone hacked 20 of its government organizations. This weekend, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) released a statement claiming that it had discovered malware designed for cyberespionage on the computer networks of 20 Russian government organizations.

National: Hacker threat extends beyond parties | Politico

The furor over the cyberattacks injecting turmoil into Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign obscures a more pervasive danger to the U.S. political process: Much of it has only lax security against hackers, with few if any federal cops on the beat. No one regulator is responsible for requiring campaigns, political operations and state and local agencies to protect the sanctity of the voter rolls, voters’ personal data, donors’ financial information or even the election outcomes themselves. And as the Democrats saw in Philadelphia this past week, the result can be chaos. The most extreme danger, of course, is that cyber intruders could hack the voting machinery to pick winners and losers. But even less-ambitious exploits could sway the results in a close election — anything from tampering with parties’ volunteer schedules and get-out-the-vote operations to deleting the registrations of frequent voters or knocking registration databases offline. Cyber scams aimed at campaign donors’ financial data, such as a just-disclosed hack aimed at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, could deter future contributors by making them fear identity theft. Or, as happened this past week to the Democratic National Committee, online thieves could get hold of a political operation’s embarrassing internal emails, creating headaches for a presidential candidate just before she accepts her party’s nomination.

National: U.S. Wrestles With How to Fight Back Against Cyberattacks | The New York Times

It has been an open secret throughout the Obama presidency that world powers have escalated their use of cyberpower. But the recent revelations of hacking into Democratic campaign computer systems in an apparent attempt to manipulate the 2016 election is forcing the White House to confront a new question: whether, and if so how, to retaliate. So far, the administration has stopped short of publicly accusing the Russian government of President Vladimir V. Putin of engineering the theft of research and emails from the Democratic National Committee and hacking into other campaign computer systems. However, private investigators have identified the suspects, and American intelligence agencies have told the White House that they have “high confidence” that the Russian government was responsible. Less certain is who is behind the selective leaks of the material, and whether they have a clear political objective. Suspecting such meddling is different from proving it with a certainty sufficient for any American president to order a response. Even if officials gather the proof, they may not be able to make their evidence public without tipping off Russia, or its proxies in cyberspace, about how deeply the National Security Agency has penetrated that country’s networks. And designing a response that will send a clear message, without prompting escalation or undermining efforts to work with Russia in places like Syria, where Russia is simultaneously an adversary and a partner, is even harder.

Illinois: Voter registration system back online after cyberattack | The Southern

Illinois’ voter registration system is back online about two weeks after it was shut down in the wake of a cyberattack. Ken Menzel, general counsel for the Illinois State Board of Elections, said Friday that the board’s focus has been on securing the voter database before bringing it back online. The board will continue investigating the attack to determine how many voters’ information may have been accessed. The attack, which the board told local election authorities it believes was the work of foreign hackers, occurred July 12, and the online registration system was taken down the following day as a precaution. It was brought back online late Thursday afternoon.

National: Trump, Putin and the hacking of an American election | The Boston Globe

Did Republican nominee Donald Trump just ask Russian strongman Vladimir Putin to cast the deciding vote in the US presidential election? On Wednesday morning, Trump said he hoped Russia would find and publish 30,000 e-mail messages deleted by his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, from the personal server she used as secretary of state. It was a startling spectacle: a presidential candidate urging a foreign government to play a role in America’s game of thrones. But there’s a chance Putin is already a player. The trove of embarrassing e-mails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, which were leaked to the press just in time for this week’s party convention in Philadelphia, were probably swiped by Russian hackers, according to US intelligence officials and independent cybersecurity companies. Russia’s apparent election tampering — and Trump’s call for the Russians to expose Clinton’s deleted e-mails — shows that the insecurity of America’s data networks could undermine our ability to hold free and fair elections. But if the Russian president would go this far to pick our next president, why not take the direct approach? Why not tamper with the computers that manage the nation’s voting systems? Maybe that has already happened. Those voting systems are certainly vulnerable.

Editorials: By November, Russian hackers could target voting machines | Bruce Schneier/The Washington Post

Russia was behind the hacks into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network that led to the release of thousands of internal emails just before the party’s convention began, U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded. The FBI is investigating. WikiLeaks promises there is more data to come. The political nature of this cyberattack means that Democrats and Republicans are trying to spin this as much as possible. Even so, we have to accept that someone is attacking our nation’s computer systems in an apparent attempt to influence a presidential election. This kind of cyberattack targets the very core of our democratic process. And it points to the possibility of an even worse problem in November — that our election systems and our voting machines could be vulnerable to a similar attack. If the intelligence community has indeed ascertained that Russia is to blame, our government needs to decide what to do in response. This is difficult because the attacks are politically partisan, but it is essential. If foreign governments learn that they can influence our elections with impunity, this opens the door for future manipulations, both document thefts and dumps like this one that we see and more subtle manipulations that we don’t see.

Illinois: Voter registration system shut down following cyber breach | StateScoop

The Illinois’ Voter Registration System, IVRS, is still down after officials discovered a security breach on July 12. The system was shut down the day after the breach was discovered, according to Kyle Thomas, the state board of elections’ director of voting and registration systems. “Once the severity of the attack was realized, as a precautionary measure, the entire IVRS system was shut down, including online voter registration,” Thomas wrote in a memo to the election authority that was posted to McLean County Clerk Kathy Michael’s Facebook page. A look-up field on IVRS that allowed voters to find out if they were already registered to vote, and at which address, could have allowed hackers access to the system, Ken Menzel, general counsel for the State Board of Elections, told StateScoop.

Russia: Why would Russia interfere in the U.S. election? Because it sometimes works. | The Washington Post

Late last week, WikiLeaks released private emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. Experts suspect the documents were obtained by hackers affiliated with the Russian government. Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager has even charged that the Russians are trying to use the emails to help elect Donald Trump. Since then, people on the left and right have expressed outrage that a foreign government would seek to influence American politics. That furor is naive. Foreign governments have sought to shape other country’s politics before. The United States has honed interventions in other countries’ elections to something of an art form. They (we) do it because such interventions can succeed, especially if they find willing accomplices in the targeted country.