Jack Gillum at ProPublica writes—Some Election-Related Websites Still Run on Vulnerable Software Older Than Many High Schoolers. The investigative site’s analysis found that websites in dozens of towns and counties voting on Super Tuesday have security weaknesses. Richmond, Va., still uses software from 2003:
The Richmond, Virginia, website that tells people where to vote and publishes election results runs on a 17-year-old operating system. Software used by election-related sites in Johnston County, North Carolina, and the town of Barnstable, Massachusetts, had reached its expiration date, making security updates no longer available.
These aging systems reflect a larger problem: A ProPublica investigation found that at least 50 election-related websites in counties and towns voting on Super Tuesday — accounting for nearly 2 million voters — were particularly vulnerable to cyberattack. The sites, where people can find out how to register to vote, where to cast ballots and who won the election, had security issues such as outdated software, poor encryption and systems encumbered with unneeded computer programs. None of the localities contacted by ProPublica said that their sites had been disrupted by cyberattacks.
ProPublica also spotted files that should have been kept hidden because, when identified, they could give hackers a roadmap to the computer system’s weaknesses. Some election websites shared the same computer server with many other local government sites, magnifying the potential repercussions of an attack. “Shared hosting environments are rarely appropriate for critical infrastructure,” researchers Bob Rudis and Tod Beardsley of the security firm Rapid7 wrote in a February report for ProPublica.
At a time when cybersecurity concerns have come to the forefront of American elections, ProPublica’s findings reveal the frailty of some local computer networks. Fake Election Day information could disenfranchise voters by sending them to the wrong polling place. Tainted results could stall a campaign, since primary wins drive momentum with financial contributions and political support. [...]
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“When it comes to the qualifications that we should demand of our president, to start with, we need someone who will take the job seriously. [...] We also need someone who is steady and measured because when making life or death, war or peace decisions, a president can’t just pop off or lash out irrationally. And I think we can all agree that someone who’s roaming around at 3 a.m. tweeting should not have their fingers on the nuclear codes.” ~~Michelle Obama (2016)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Someone help me find the political genius here?
Politico on the fight by New Democrats and Blue Dogs to stop the mortgage relief bill coming to the floor this week:
Moderates worry Pelosi is routinely staking very liberal positions to push House versions of big bills as far to the left as possible to enhance their standing in negotiations with the historically centrist Senate. This might be a smart tactic, but it often hurts Democrats who rely on Republican votes to win reelection. Put bluntly, it makes them look too liberal.
"Moderates worry."
Stop the presses! Hahahahahahahaha! "Dog bites man!" "Sun rises in East!"
Yes, trying to help the nearly 2.5 million homeowners projected to go into foreclosure in 2009 "makes them look too liberal," and the only way to make this bill "moderate" enough is to side with the banks, who had the gift of the Republican bankruptcy bill handed to them in 2005, but still couldn't manage to survive as a viable industry without at $700 billion bailout (with more to come).
So the genius of Ellen Tauscher's (D-CA-10) position? Democrats need to side with the banks who converted their 2005 gift into the complete meltdown of the world financial order, then siphoned off trillions of public dollars to "stabilize" themselves, and now want still more blood from the homeowners they killed in creating this mess.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Coronavirus is coming. Don't panic! But also, don't not panic! Greg Dworkin is here to help you make sense of all that. Same goes for Super Tuesday, by the way. But lest we make too much sense, let's discuss delegates and how they’re made.
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