A minor kerfuffle in a minor state. No wonder
this isn’t making much mainstream news.
Who Ordered
Destruction of Data That Could Have Proved Georgia Election Rigging?
(Related).
KSU Says
Elections Server Was Wiped After FBI Gave Clearance
Kennesaw State University says a computer server
holding state election data was wiped clean after copies of it were
made by the FBI and the agency told KSU its investigation into a
possible hack was complete.
A group suing the state, charging Georgia’s
voting system is outdated and not secure, says KSU erased the server
in July after its lawsuit was filed. The group says data on the
server may have revealed whether state elections were hacked.
“This was not accidental. This was something
that was conducted with purpose to make sure that the information
could never be recovered again,” said Richard DeMillo, a computing
professor at Georgia Tech who has been closely watching the case.
… “Following the notification
from the FBI that no data was compromised and the investigation was
closed, the server was returned to the University’s
Information Technology Services group and securely stored,” the
statement said.
(Related). This is my favorite headline.
In Total
Coincidence, Georgia Destroys Election Data Days After Vote Hacking
Lawsuit
On July 4th, presumably while honoring freedom,
Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp learned
that his office was being sued for ignoring clear evidence that his
state’s voting machines were compromised and extremely vulnerable
to vote manipulation for over a year.
On July 7th, all vote count data for the summer’s
special election between Karen Handel and John Ossoff, which the suit
sought to have overturned, was
wiped from the state’s servers.
… Kemp knows election integrity is serious and
important, especially because his state’s voting machines “run on
a modified version of Windows last updated by Microsoft 14 years
ago,” and “had been compromised and left unprotected from
intruders since at least last summer,” and “despite claims to the
contrary from Georgia officials […] the state’s election machines
are connected to the Internet every time they come in contact with an
electronic device that’s been inserted into a computer that’s
connected online.”
… Nobody has yet said who ordered the thorough
destruction of the data on July 7th, nor the later destruction of all
backup data, nor why it was done. It was “standard operating
procedure,” according to the media office at Kennesaw State
University, where Georgia’s election data is kept.
For who among us doubts that it’s the very
definition of “standard” for Georgia to obliterate any possible
evidence of election tampering?
The AP
reports that the FBI copied at least some of the relevant data in
March, during its own investigation into security issues,
so everything is even better than fine.
The Equifax story is far from over.
States Push
Equifax to Explain Why It Took 6 Weeks to Disclose Hack
Attorneys general in at least five states are
looking into why credit-reporting firm Equifax Inc. didn’t tell the
public for nearly six weeks about the massive data breach that
potentially compromised the personal information of 145.5 million
Americans.
An update.
NotPetya
Attack Had Significant Impact on Merck Revenue
American
pharmaceutical giant Merck reported last week that the recent
NotPetya malware attack caused losses of hundreds of millions of
dollars in revenue.
The
company’s financial results for the third quarter show that
worldwide sales decreased by 2 percent to $10.3 billion compared to
the same quarter of 2016. This was partly blamed on sales reduced by
roughly $240 million due to insufficient stock of Gardasil 9, a
vaccine designed to prevent certain cancers and other diseases caused
by human papillomavirus (HPV).
Merck
said it had to borrow the product from the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention’s Pediatric Vaccine Stockpile due to a
higher demand than originally planned and the temporary
disruption to production
caused by the NotPetya
attack.
“Additionally,
as expected, revenue was unfavorably impacted by approximately $135
million from lost sales in certain markets related to the
cyber-attack,” the company said in its latest SEC
filing.
Each
new technology revisits the learning curve of each prior technology.
Something for my Computer Security students as we
discuss Disaster Recovery. Anyone can get it wrong.
Hewlett-Packard
history lost to Santa Rosa fires
One of Silicon Valley's most important historic
archives, that of the Hewlett-Packard company, has been destroyed in
the Santa Rosa wildfires.
The Santa Rosa Press Democrat blames
the loss of the archives on a decision to remove them from vaults
that used to house them.
… The fires, which killed at least 23 Santa
Rosa residents and destroyed 6,800 homes, left most of Keysight's
campus with minor damage, but the modular buildings that housed the
archives were completely destroyed.
Anything we should learn?
How Europe
fights fake news
… Unlike
the US, where we rely on corporate
efforts to tackle the
problems of fake news and disinformation online, the
European Commission and some national governments are wading into the
murky waters of free speech, working to come up with viable ways to
stop election-meddling and the violence that has resulted from false
news reports.
For all my geeks.
200
universities just launched 560 free online courses
by Sabrina
I. Pacifici on Oct 29, 2017
Medium – Dhawal
Shah: “If you haven’t heard, universities around the world
offering their courses online for free (or at-least partially
free). These courses are collectively called as MOOCS or Massive
Open Online Courses. In the past six years or so, close to 800
universities have created more than 8,000 of these MOOCs. And
I’ve been keeping track of these MOOCs the entire time over at
Class
Central, ever since they rose to prominence… Here’s
the full list of new free online courses…”
Tools for our App developers.
These days, there are many types of desktop
devices, along with the many
different operating systems that run on them. As such, getting
programs that work on all of them can be a bit
of a challenge. And that’s where Electron open framework comes
in, as a way of helping to solve this problem.
Electron is a software framework for easy cross
platform application development. This extends to most desktop
operating systems, such as Windows, Mac, and Linux.
(Related) Possible applications?
Library of
Congress Congressional Data Challenge
The
National
Data Challenge from the Library
of Congress is a competition that is asking "citizen coders"
to develop creative ways to use technology to analyze, visualize, and
interpret data sets from congress.gov
as well as other platforms. The idea is to create a product that
helps others discover, use, and explore the massive collection of
legislative information that is available from the Library.
Some
examples of what the staff at the Library of Congress envision
include:
-
A visualization of how the legislative process works.
-
Tools that could be embedded on Congressional websites.
-
A tool that will allow members of congress to be matched with other members who have similar legislative interests.
The Library of Congress will award $5000 to the
first prize winner and $1000 for the best high school project.
Submissions must be received by April 2, 2018 and include a 2-minute
video.
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