Disinformation Spurs a Thriving Industry as U.S. Election Looms

In the years since the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, threat actors have pieced together a new playbook for sowing confusion and doubt within the American electorate. On Wednesday, researchers with Cisco Talos released a report PDF that details how a number of these new sophisticated campaigns...

What to expect when you're electing: The building blocks of disinformation campaigns

By Nick Biasini, Kendall McKay and Matt Valites. As Cisco Talos discovered during our four-year investigation into election security, securing elections is an extremely difficult, complex task. In the first paper in our election series, “What to expect when you’re electing,” Talos outlined how th...

Shoring Up the 2020 Election: Secure Vote Tallies Aren't the Problem

With the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election coming up in just two months, cybersecurity concerns are taking center stage for average citizens and politicians. That said, the likelihood of election results being impacted by an attack are slim, security researchers say. The focus should be on other...

The Furious Hunt for the MAGA Bomber

Scarred by trauma and devoted to Trump, a man began mailing explosives to the president’s critics on the eve of an election. Inside the race to catch him...

Belarus Has Shut Down the Internet Amid a Controversial Election

Human rights organizations have blamed the Belarusian government for widespread outages...

U.S. Offers Reward of $10M for Info Leading to Discovery of Election Meddling

The U.S. government is concerned about foreign interference in the 2020 election, so much so that it will offer a reward of up to $10 million for anyone providing information that could lead to tracking down potential cybercriminals aiming to sabotage the November vote. The U.S. Department of...

Black Hat 2020: In a Turnaround, Voting Machine Vendor Embraces Ethical Hackers

Voting machine-maker Election Systems & Software ES&S has formally announced a vulnerability disclosure policy, Wednesday, during a Black Hat USA 2020 session. The move, which comes with the U.S. presidential elections looming in November, shows that voting-machine vendors are beginning to take t...

Voting Machine Makers Are Finally Playing Nice With Hackers

After years of secrecy, one major election tech company is giving more hackers a look under the hood...

Black Hat 2020: Scaling Mail-In Voting Spawns Broad Challenges

Security researcher Matt Blaze opened Black Hat 2020 with a call-to-arms for cybersecurity experts, asking them during his keynote to leverage their passion for election security to help secure the upcoming U.S. presidential elections, which will likely be a mostly vote-by-mail affair. “This...

Google Updates Ad Policies to Counter Influence Campaigns, Extortion

Google is making two changes in its advertising policy as the U.S. moves into the fall election season ahead of the presidential contest in November, in an attempt to thwart disinformation campaigns. For one, Google is updating its Google Ads Misrepresentation Policy to prevent coordinated activi...

Black Hat USA 2020 Preview: Election Security, COVID Disinformation and More

Despite COVID-19 pushing the Black Hat USA 2020 conference to go virtual for the first time, you can expect a steady stream of new security research, threat intel and an impressive lineup of high-profile speakers. This year’s conference kicks off with Matt Blaze, McDevitt Chair in Computer Scienc...

Threat Source newsletter for July 16, 2020

Newsletter compiled by Jon Munshaw. Good afternoon, Talos readers. If you haven’t already, we highly recommend you read our in-depth research paper on election security. This paper represents four years of hands-on research, interviews and insight into how things have changed since 2016, and what...

What to expect when you’re electing: Talos’ 2020 election security primer

By Jon Munshaw and Matt Olney. After the 2016 General Election, the talk was all around foreign meddling. Rumors swirled that some votes may have been changed or influenced by state-sponsored actors. Sanctions and accusations followed. Four years later, is the U.S. any more prepared to protect th...

Hackers deface Roblox accounts with pro-Trump messages

By Sudais Asif Roblox has over 100 million registered users but only a handful of accounts were compromised. As the US presidential election is nearby, voters across the 50 state empire are betting on their candidates in light of the proposals they offer. However, some are going far enough to tak...

Georgia’s Failure Shows How Not to Run an Election in the Pandemic

Limiting in-person polling sites makes it both harder to vote and more dangerous...

Security Analysis of the Democracy Live Online Voting System

New research: "Security Analysis of the Democracy Live Online Voting System": Abstract: Democracy Live's OmniBallot platform is a web-based system for blank ballot delivery, ballot marking, and optionally online voting. Three states -- Delaware, West Virginia, and New Jersey -- recently announced...

Phishing Attacks against Trump and Biden Campaigns

Google's threat analysts have identified state-level attacks from China. I hope both campaigns are working under the assumption that everything they say and do will be dumped on the Internet before the election. That feels like the most likely outcome...

Trump, Biden Campaign Staffers Targeted By APT Phishing Emails

With the U.S. presidential election months away, advanced persistent threat APT groups are targeting the campaign staffers of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden in recent phishing attacks. On Thursday, Shane Huntley with Google’s Threat Analysis Group said on Twitter that two separate phishing...

'Kill Chain': HBO's Election Security Doc Stresses Urgency

A new documentary makes crystal clear how little time remains to protect the 2020 election...

Despite Coronavirus, Washington Isn't Worried About Its Primary

The state conducts its elections almost entirely by mail. The rest of the country should pay attention...