Tag Archive for: Election

Election campaigns in Kerala turn ugly: Cyber warfare, personal attacks and allegations galore – SPECIAL – GENERAL

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THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In the midst of the parliamentary election campaign in the state, which will last only a week, the competition has turned to personal attacks and cyber warfare against candidates, intensifying the already fierce atmosphere.

Former minister and LDF candidate from Vadakara, KK Shailaja, once again came forward yesterday demanding action as cyber attacks escalated. Shailaja alleged in a complaint to the Central Election Commission and the Chief Minister that there is an organized attempt by a criminal gang in the UDF to personally smear her using morphed photos, with the alleged connivance of UDF candidate Shafi Parambil. PM State Secretary MV Govindan accused a section of the media of abetting this.

Meanwhile, Shafi Parambil approached the High Court seeking to halt the fake votes planned by the LDF in Vadakara. Alleging that most of the polling officers and policemen assigned to election duty are Left sympathizers, Shafi also blamed the Panoor bomb blast.

In a petition filed by sitting MP Adoor Prakash in the High Court, the demand is to remove about one and a half lakh double votes in the Attingal constituency. LDF candidate V Joy’s response is that he is being accused out of fear of failure.

BJP targets Tharoor

BJP is targeting Tharoor, citing Supreme Court lawyer Jai Anand’s revelation that Thiruvananthapuram sitting MP and Congress Working Committee member Shashi Tharoor behaved indecently with a woman in a Delhi hotel in October 2022. It was also alleged that media activist Karan Thapar tried to cover up the complaint. BJP IT cell chief Amit Malviya demanded answers from Tharoor and Thapar. Tharoor’s stance is that the allegation is timed before the election and if the woman has a complaint, she should come forward with proof.

CM responds to Modi

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has accused the Chief Minister and his daughter of corruption, has stated that the culprits will not be spared, which is being interpreted as an indication of internal drama ahead of the elections. Yesterday, the Chief Minister responded that there are clear records of the money transfer between the two companies and no…

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Election security threats require more federal resources, officials say

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State and local election officials warned during a Senate Rules and Administration Committee hearing on Wednesday that nefarious uses of emerging technologies, hacking attempts and the harassment of election workers risk undermining the public’s faith in the accuracy of U.S. elections without more federal intervention.

Since the 2020 presidential election, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said his state has live-streamed equipment certifications to promote transparency and worked with the National Association of Secretaries of State and federal agencies to instill trust in the voting process. But he added that “there’s still more that can be done” at the federal level, including providing local jurisdictions with more election-related funding and guidance to safeguard their systems and personnel. 

He said artificial intelligence, for instance, “has the potential to confuse voters and wreak havoc on the administration of elections,” including allowing deepfakes of election officials to spread misinformation on social media.

“If I were to go on TV afterwards, or even Instagram Live, to debunk these deepfakes, who would know which was the real me?” he added. “Foreign actors from hostile states such as Iran, China, Russia and North Korea appear ready to take advantage of this nightmare scenario.”

Lingering conspiracies about the accuracy of U.S. elections are also resulting in new challenges for election officials. Some jurisdictions are being overwhelmed with what Fontes called “analog” distributed denial-of-service — or DDoS — attacks, which he said “comes in overly voluminous and unnecessary public records requests that have absolutely nothing at their end.”

“We hear of a DDoS attack against an electronic system where hackers will come in and absolutely flood a system with digital attacks,” Fontes said, adding that he supports rigorous transparency but that these types of constant requests often represent “a coordinated effort to undermine the democracy that upholds our republic.”

While not all officials at the hearing voiced support for more federal involvement in the voting process or expressed concerns about the intimidation of election…

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Fix security holes in election management

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North Korea can infiltrate South Korea’s internal network to manipulate voting results if it wants to, according to the National Intelligence Service’s (NIS) investigation of the National Election Commission (NEC). The finding on the NEC that oversees the process of presidential, parliamentary and local elections is shocking, especially ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections on April 10. In the worst possible scenario, the security loopholes in the election management system can prompt losers not to accept the results of the legislative election.

On Tuesday, the NIS announced the results of its investigation on the NEC’s election management system from July 17. It discovered a fault in the ballot opening procedure, which is crucial to the election outcome. Anyone could break into the NEC system by using a staffer’s password, which was, simply, “12345.”

The confusion in the early voting system was also confirmed to be serious. Hackers can easily break into the computer network from unauthorized outside systems, change early voters into nonvoters and manipulate the numbers to influence the final votes.

Stamping in early votes also could be easily exposed, as faking ballot cards was possible through printing tricks. A North Korean hacking group broke into the email box of an NEC employee in 2021, stole sensitive data, and leaked it to outside.

Whether North Korea succeeded in raiding South Korea’s election management system is unclear. The latest results should not be linked to raising questions on the outcome of the 2020 parliamentary elections and others. But the NEC must come up with appropriate measures to address its systemic vulnerabilities to North Korea’s hacking threat, especially ahead of the parliamentary election next April. The election management body must pay more heed to the early voting system due to the alarming findings in the previous legislative election. If quick fixes cannot be possible, authorities need to consider strengthening the firewall or streamlining the system.

The NEC retorted that voting results cannot be manipulated as they proceed publicly unless there is a large…

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How DEF CON’s election hackers are trying to protect themselves

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Every August at a conference hall in Las Vegas, long lines of computer hackers armed with USB sticks, screwdrivers or their bare fingernails try breaking into election equipment — all in the hope of finding better ways to protect it.

But organizers of the event at this year’s DEF CON hacker convention — which ends Sunday — spent just as much time focusing on the physical safety of the security researchers hacking into machines as they did on the hardware. Since former President Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election, the researchers who scour election equipment for vulnerabilities have increasingly been targets of threats and harassment.

So the organizers of the conference’s “Voting Village” hacking event enlisted undercover security consultants, moved the event to a side room where they could more closely monitor who went in and out and briefed their nearly two dozen volunteers on what to do if any agitators showed up.

The measures offer a small window into an increasingly regular feature of America’s voting security landscape. The rise in disinformation-fueled threats is forcing election administrators, poll workers and security researchers to think more deeply about physical safety, and take a host of new precautions to do their job.

At last year’s DEF CON, a pair of minor but troubling incidents involving election conspiracy theorists set off alarm bells for said Catherine Terranova, one of the two organizers of the Voting Village.

“The day after DEF CON ended last year, I started pouring all of my time and energy into figuring out how to secure this village,” Terranova said. “I said to myself, ‘we are never doing this like this again.’”

It’s an issue government election security officials are thinking about as well.

“Any threat of violence against an election official, poll worker, or anyone else working to safeguard our democracy is completely unacceptable. These folks are members of our communities, and dedicated public servants,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement.

The Voting Village is a small part of the enormous DEF CON conference, which draws almost 30,000 hackers annually. It started in the aftermath of the…

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