Garrett M. Graff/WIRED
Wednesday night, at a brief, hastily arranged press conference at FBI headquarters, four top US national security officials announced solemnly that they had evidence that two foreign adversaries, Iran and Russia, had obtained US voter data and appeared to be trying to spread disinformation about the election.
It was the latest—and most troubling—episode in a week that has seen near-daily events set off potential alarms about how the US will hold up on and approaching Election Day. In the final hours last Tuesday before the voter registration deadline in Virginia, an accidentally cut fiber-optic cable knocked out access to the state registration portal. The next morning, the New York Post published an odd, inconsistent, and poorly sourced story about Hunter Biden and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma that reeked of a ham-handed information operation. A day later came an extended outage of Twitter. Neither the Virginia cable cutting nor the Twitter outage was nefarious, though US officials continue to argue over the origins of the Burisma leaks
.This week, voters in states like Alaska and Florida began reporting threatening emails, purportedly from the white supremacist group Proud Boys, saying that the targeted Democratic voters should support Donald Trump—or else. National security officials soon confirmed that the emails appeared to originate with Iran—a revelation that led to Wednesday’s press conference.
FBI director Christopher Wray used the event to highlight how united and focused the nation’s security leadership is on protecting the election. “We are not going to let our guard down,” Wray said. Yet the emails and other episodes suggest that the presidential election is sure to be filled with more unexpected surprises and tense moments—and served as reminders of the myriad ways that the election could go wrong in the remaining weeks, days, and hours of the campaign.
Interviews and conversations with numerous election, law enforcement, and intelligence personnel over the last year have highlighted a dozen specific scenarios that particularly worry them as Election Day nears. The concerns roughly break down into two categories: technical attacks on data or access and online information operations.
Full Article: 12 Cyber Threats That Could Wreak Havoc on the Election | WIRED
https://www.wired.com/story/election-threats-cyberattacks-misinformation/
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International election observers in the U.S. consider this year the most challenging ever | Carol Morello/The Washington Post
As the eyes of the world focus on the U.S. election, teams of international observers are heading out across the United States amid concerns about the vote’s integrity. For the ninth time, observers affiliated with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) have come to the United States to watch over an election and recommend improvements, a mission little-noticed by most Americans. But the 2020 campaign is different.
As fears rise about voter suppression, violence and a potentially contested outcome in the United States, the Europeans say they hope their efforts will help assure Americans the vote is legitimate.
“This is one of the most important elections we have ever observed as the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly,” said Roberto Montella, secretary general of the group, which will dispatch 59 lawmakers and a staff of 16 to monitor voting in 10 states and the District of Columbia.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/election-international-monitors/2020/10/22/91712842-13c4-11eb-82af-864652063d61_story.html
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Voter Websites In California And Florida Could Be Vulnerable To Hacks, Report Finds | Dina Temple-Raston/NPR
Back in July, two cybersecurity firms sent the Department of Homeland Security a troubling report that described a possible vulnerability in the online voter registration systems in dozens of counties in California and Florida.
The report, obtained by NPR, warned that flaws that might have allowed hackers to change a handful of voter registration files four years ago are still likely to exist in some places, and could be used again.
A spokesperson for DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, called the report "questionable" and "unverified," and said the department "takes vulnerability reporting and remediation seriously."
The report comes, however, as Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe announced Wednesday that Russian and Iranian hackers had used some voter registration information in a bid to send misinformation to voters and sow discord ahead of the election. It is unclear if the voter registration websites the report identified as vulnerable were part of the hack Ratcliffe revealed.
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https://www.npr.org/2020/10/22/925388871/voter-websites-in-california-and-florida-could-be-vulnerable-to-hacks-report-fin