Security News
For its part, Microsoft announced a five-step election protection strategy it'll roll out in the coming months "In the United States and other countries where critical elections will take place in 2024," Microsoft president Brad Smith and VP technology for fundamental rights Teresa Hutson said in a blog post. Microsoft's first initiative is the Content Credentials service, where Redmond will roll out digital watermarking metadata for images and videos as designed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity, of which Microsoft is a member.
The US Capitol's election agency says a ransomware crew might have stolen its entire voter roll, which includes the personal information of all registered voters in the District of Columbia. The DC Board of Elections first became aware of the intrusion on October 5, when a criminal gang called RansomVC claimed to have broken into a server belonging to DataNet Systems, the agency's website hosting provider, and accessed 600,000 items of US voter data including DC voter records.
The District of Columbia Board of Elections says that a threat actor who breached a web server operated by the DataNet Systems hosting provider in early October may have obtained access to the personal information of all registered voters. The entire voter roll that may have been exposed contains a wide range of personally identifiable information, including driver's license numbers, dates of birth, partial social security numbers, and contact information such as phone numbers and email addresses.
If an AI breaks the rules for you, does that count as breaking the rules? This is the essential question being taken up by the Federal Election Commission this month, and public input is needed to curtail the potential for AI to take US campaigns off the rails. Future uses of AI by campaigns go far beyond deepfaked images.
The District of Columbia Board of Elections is currently probing a data leak involving an unknown number of voter records following breach claims from a threat actor known as RansomedVC. DCBOE operates as an autonomous agency within the District of Columbia Government and is entrusted with overseeing elections, managing ballot access, and handling voter registration processes. "We have successfully breached the District of Columbia Board Of Elections and have gotten more than 600k lines of USA Voters," the threat actor says.
Šimečka and Denník N immediately denounced the audio as fake. The fact-checking department of news agency AFP said the audio showed signs of being manipulated using AI. But the recording was posted during a 48-hour moratorium ahead of the polls opening, during which media outlets and politicians are supposed to stay silent.
Šimečka and Denník N immediately denounced the audio as fake. The fact-checking department of news agency AFP said the audio showed signs of being manipulated using AI. But the recording was posted during a 48-hour moratorium ahead of the polls opening, during which media outlets and politicians are supposed to stay silent.
In the 2024 presidential election campaign, you can bank on the appearance of AI-generated personalized fundraising emails, text messages from chatbots urging you to vote, and maybe even some deepfaked campaign avatars. A candidate could use tools enabled by large language models, or LLMs-the technology behind apps such as ChatGPT and the art-making DALL-E-to do micro-polling or message testing, and to solicit perspectives and testimonies from their political audience individually and at scale.
Four US citizens have been accused of working on behalf of the Russian government to push pro-Kremlin propaganda and unduly influence elections in Florida. The indictment follows earlier charges last year [PDF] against Moscow resident Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, two unnamed Russian Federal Security Service agents, and four unnamed Americans for their roles in recruiting US political groups to sow discord and division among voters, and push, among other fringe ideologies, California's secession from the US. It's claimed this same group of FSB agents also funded and directed the political campaign of a particular candidate for office in St Petersburg, Florida, in 2019, we're told.
The head of both US Cyber Command and the NSA, Gen. Paul Nakasone, broadly discussed that first organization's offensive cyber operations during the runup to the 2022 midterm elections. "We did conduct operations persistently to make sure that our foreign adversaries couldn't utilize infrastructure to impact us," said Nakasone.