Security News
Electronic voting machine maker Smartmatic has sued Fox News, three of its hosts, and two of Donald Trump's loyalists - Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell - for an eye-popping $2.7bn in defamation damages over the false claims it stole the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden. The voting tech biz, in its court filing, said Fox News broadcast entirely bogus claims that Smartmatic's devices were engineered to secretly swing vote counts in Biden's favor in US states where the results were close.
Last week I signed on to two joint letters about the security of the 2020 election. At a minimum, all states should employ election security practices and mechanisms recommended by experts to increase assurance in election outcomes, such as post-election risk-limiting audits.
President Donald Trump tonight fired the boss of the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the very organisation his administration formed with the aim of shoring up America's computer networks from hackers. The Trump 2020 campaign and the Tweeter-in-Chief both challenge that assessment of election security, and allege widespread voter fraud, but have yet to offer any hard evidence of wrongdoing.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired the director of the federal agency that vouched for the reliability of the 2020 election. Trump fired Christopher Krebs in a tweet, saying his recent statement defending the security of the election was "Highly inaccurate."
More than 1,500 fraudulent votes were cast in the early hours of Monday in the country's annual bird election, briefly pushing the Little-Spotted Kiwi to the top of the leaderboard, organizers and environmental organization Forest & Bird announced Tuesday. Those votes - which were discovered by the election's official scrutineers - have since been removed.
Despite ongoing unsubstantiated claims of fraud from the outgoing Trump administration, senior election officials charged with securing the 2020 vote on Thursday said they had done so successfully. "The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history," said the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Council Executive Committees in a joint statement, along with the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other organizations.
What's more, the voting itself was remarkably smooth. There were not clear rules in many states for voting by mail or sufficient opportunities for voting early.
Plenty of voter data is public in Arizona - but Social Security numbers and DoBs are supposed to be kept confidential. The security issue comes to light amid attacks targeting voters and voter data.
Threat actors have taken advantage of the ongoing uncertainty around the 2020 U.S. election to unleash a new malspam campaign aimed at spreading the Qbot trojan. Criminals behind Qbot resurfaced the day after the election with a wave of spam emails that attempt to lure victims with messages claiming to have information about election interference, according to new researchers.
Consumer anxiety regarding the election results had a muted impact on online shopping activities on Election Day, Nov. 3. Adobe's report noted that today, the day after the election, there will be an expected 13% drop in sales, versus the previous three days, in which online sales increased by 31%. "To be clear," said Taylor Schreiner, director at Adobe Digital Insights, "We're not basing our forecast on who wins the presidency, rather we're looking at people's propensity to shop online during an election cycle, based on historical context."