Hype or Hacker? How to Protect Yourself from Election Fraud
The US election system is resilient against direct hacking efforts, reports Jen Easterly, head of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), responsible for securing elections, in an interview with the AP. The system’s strength lies in the use of paper ballots by over 97% of voters that are audited and counted by humans, she says. Her assessment agrees with the consensus among cybersecurity professionals, like Google’s cybersecurity firm Mandiant , which stated in a report that there has never been a known case of a voting machine being compromised by hackers in the wild, and there has been little observed effort to compromise voting machine manufacturers. Those machines do not connect to the internet, so any effort to hack them would have to happen in advance of the election and would be evident immediately upon the auditing of associated paper ballots.
With hacking vote-counting machines off the table, entities with an interest in swaying the outcome instead focus on you and me, individual voters, whose opinions they may change through propaganda or the leak of stolen information. Here’s what to watch out for.
Warning! How to Know If That Fraud Alert Phone Call Is Real
Scammers can call you and have it appear as coming from any phone number they like. This technique, called spoofing, gets used in all kinds of mischief. The latest innovation in the scuzzy market of scammers is to call you pretending to be Google support, claiming your account has been compromised. The scammer may ask if you’re traveling, offer details about your account, and tell you your account has been compromised and someone has downloaded copies of your data. The calls are professional, polished, and sound like they might just be legitimately from Google, except for one thing: Google will never call you this way. Google also has some powerful security features that, if enabled for your account, should short-circuit this kind of attack. Read more, and what to do.
How to Know If the Internet Archive Breach Affects You & What to Do
The Internet Archive is yet another victim of a data breach. The Internet Archive is likely the world’s largest online library, preserving entire websites, media, software, and more. Like Wikipedia, this organization is completely nonprofit and offers its information for free. Which puts these attackers firmly in the kicking-of-puppies stage of their descent toward the heart of darkness.
On October 9th, the hacktivist group known as BlackMeta targeted the Internet Archive with a devastating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which brought the entire site down. At the same time, the site suffered a data breach, which was unrelated to the DDoS attack, according to Bleeping Computer. The data that was stolen included “email addresses, screen names, password change timestamps, encrypted passwords, and other internal data.” As of October 21st, the Internet Archive is slowly coming back online. Read more and how to find out if you’re affected. Read more, and what to do.
