Internet Security Issues | CTVotersCount.org

Connecticut Makes National Short List – Embarrassing

Yesterday the Connecticut Online Voter Registration System was down for the morning. Reminiscent of last fall when the system was down for most of the last day local election officials had to print voter lists for polling places in the November election.

Last week Reuters covered a study of cybersecurity and Connecticut was cited as one of the weakest states. It also cited the U.S. Government as worse than most U.S. Corporations.

We sadly await the Election Day when the Connecticut voter registration system is down, especially with no contingency plan for Election Day Registration. Don’t say “Who Could Have Imagined”, we did.

Last week Reuters covered a study of cybersecurity and Connecticut was cited as one of the weakest states. It also cited the U.S. Government as worse than most U.S. Corporations: U.S. government worse than all major industries on cyber security <read>

U.S. federal, state and local government agencies rank in last place in cyber security when compared against 17 major private industries, including transportation, retail and healthcare, according to a new report released Thursday.

The analysis, from venture-backed security risk benchmarking startup SecurityScorecard, measured the relative security health of government and industries across 10 categories, including vulnerability to malware infections, exposure rates of passwords and susceptibility to social engineering, such as an employee using corporate account information on a public social network.

Educations, telecommunications and pharmaceutical industries also ranked low, the report found. Information services, construction, food and technology were among the top performers…

Other low-performing government organizations included the U.S. Department of State and the information technology systems used by Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Washington and Maricopa County, Arizona.

Safe as an ostrich, from cyber attack.

Imagine no Internet for a few weeks. Imagine if that is because there is no power grid. CNN.Money: Cyber-Safe: How Corporate America keeps huge hacks secret

The backbone of America — banks, oil and gas suppliers, the energy grid — is under constant attack by hackers.

But the biggest cyberattacks, the ones that can blow up chemical tanks and burst dams, are kept secret by a law that shields U.S. corporations. They’re kept in the dark forever.

Imagine no Internet for a few weeks. Imagine if that is because there is no power grid. CNN.Money: Cyber-Safe: How Corporate America keeps huge hacks secret
<read>

The backbone of America — banks, oil and gas suppliers, the energy grid — is under constant attack by hackers.

But the biggest cyberattacks, the ones that can blow up chemical tanks and burst dams, are kept secret by a law that shields U.S. corporations. They’re kept in the dark forever.

You could live near — or work at — a major facility that has been hacked repeatedly and investigated by the federal government. But you’d never know.

What’s more, that secrecy could hurt efforts to defend against future attacks.

The murky information that is publicly available confirms that there is plenty to worry about.

Unnamed energy utilities and suppliers often make simple mistakes — easily exposing the power grid to terrorist hackers and foreign spies. A CNNMoney investigation has reviewed public documents issued by regulators that reveal widespread flaws.

Reminds us of the “little” error by a DNC vendor a few weeks ago. Except that a successful attack on the power grid vulnerability could be much more devastating.

Robert M. Lee spent time in the U.S. Air Force, where he identified critical infrastructure attacks as a “cyber warfare officer.” Now he travels the world for the SANS Institute, teaching the actual government investigators and power plant computer teams who face these types of dangerous attacks.

Except he doesn’t have any class material. He can’t find it. It’s all secret.

“My class is the only hands-on training for industrial control systems, but my students’ number one complaint is that there aren’t case studies or enough data out there about the real threat we’re facing,” he said. “There’s no lessons learned. It is extremely destructive to the overall national security status of critical infrastructure.”

Will encryption save us? No, “It’s Saturday Night!”

Last Saturday, some may have been channel surfing and mistakenly thought they were watching Saturday Night Live. As one the 2% of voters spending last Saturday night intentionally watching the debate between the Democratic candidates and two ABC hosts, I was not the only one that noticed the flaws in one candidate’s claims for encryption that went unchallenged.

Fortunately, Jenna McLaughlin of The Intercept articulates the issues and the faulty assumptions of candidates and pundits: Democratic Debate Spawns Fantasy Talk on Encryption <read>

During Saturday’s debate, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton said the U.S. should commission a “Manhattan-like project,” a reference to the secret World War II-era atomic bomb endeavor, to address the alleged threat encryption poses to law enforcement. She also admitted she doesn’t actually understand the technology.

Last Saturday, some may have been channel surfing and mistakenly thought they were watching Saturday Night Live. As one the 2% of voters(*) spending last Saturday night intentionally watching the debate between the Democratic candidates and two ABC hosts, I was not the only one that noticed the flaws in one candidate’s claims for encryption that went unchallenged.

Fortunately, Jenna McLaughlin of The Intercept articulates the issues and the faulty assumptions of candidates and pundits: Democratic Debate Spawns Fantasy Talk on Encryption <read>

During Saturday’s debate, Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton said the U.S. should commission a “Manhattan-like project,” a reference to the secret World War II-era atomic bomb endeavor, to address the alleged threat encryption poses to law enforcement. She also admitted she doesn’t actually understand the technology.

Clinton was largely parroting a popular FBI talking point that’s been highly publicized following the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino — that encryption is law enforcement’s Achilles heel in preventing crime — though there’s no evidence encryption enabled the plots to go undetected…

..law enforcement argues, the government needs some sort of a way in — a “backdoor,” “front door,” or “golden key” — to stop the bad guys in their tracks. For months, FBI Director James Comey has been proclaiming his wish for some sort of magical solution to allow law enforcement access to encrypted communications. Comey has repeatedly insisted that smart people working on technology simply need to try harder, or be incentivized properly.

But technologists and cryptographers have been saying for years that it’s impossible — without severely handicapping the protection encryption affords its users…

Yet the government has never presented a clear case where encryption has crippled a critical terrorism investigation, and law enforcement has other investigative tools in its arsenal — like traditional informants and tips, for example. Even when encryption is present, there is evidence that the FBI and other government agencies can hack into suspects’ computers and phones — bypassing encryption entirely.

And as Ed Snowden reminds us, be careful in setting precedents:

No matter how good the reason, if the U.S. sets the precedent that Apple has to compromise the security of a customer in response to a piece of government paper, what can they do when the government is China and the customer is the Dalai Lama?” he wrote to The Intercept in July.

Perhaps it is too much to ask in the limitations of the debate format, no candidate challenged these remarks and assumptions. Yet it is not just candidates and government officials that need to be fact checked. Increasingly it is correspondents and debate moderators:

Raddatz, ABC News’ chief global affairs correspondent, framed her questions in the debate as being about encryption as a “new terrorist tool used in Paris.” But criminals and terrorists have been using encryption for years, and encryption is also used legitimately by people around the world to protect sensitive information.

Read the full article for more of the arguments against and references to other pertinent articles.

* You might rate us “Mostly True” here as we rely on media reports that just under 8 million tuned in to the debates, assuming they reflected the U.S. population and most were eligible to vote, although considerably fewer do so.

Cyber risks of Internet voting and electronic voting

Two articles this week on cyber risks, one refuting Colorado’s Secretary of State on online voting. Another articulating the risks of hacking electronic voting in general.

Stay tuned and stay involved!

Two articles this week on cyber risks, one refuting Colorado’s Secretary of State on online voting. Another articulating the risks of hacking electronic voting in general.

From the Colorado Statesman: Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams obscured key facts in online-voting commentary <read>

Last week’s guest commentary by Secretary of State Wayne Williams in The Colorado Statesman obscured some important facts. He was responding to criticism of his new rule establishing criteria for the casting of election ballots by email.

In it, Secretary Williams implies that the federal government expanded voting by email. He writes, “The federal government, along with the Colorado General Assembly, expanded the electronic ballot transmission for military and overseas voters.” In fact the federal government has neither endorsed nor expanded the return of marked ballots over email…

Secretary Williams claims that of the nearly 3,400 ballots sent back electronically in 2014 there was not a single report of tampering. This raises two issues: First, “no report” is meaningless when tampering of online ballots can be done undetectably. Experienced hackers can penetrate a system for a very long time without detection, as seen in recently publicized successful attacks on the FBI and Pentagon. A Colorado voter whose email ballot has been altered would never know; the elections office also will never know…Second, for years there has been no state rule to guide these vulnerable voters through this security minefield, nor to spell out the very narrow parameters required by law, needlessly putting many more than even those 3,400 votes at risk…

Given our shared concern is for ensuring the safe return of military and overseas voters’ ballots, the record of other states can be instructive. Minnesota and Wisconsin consistently lead the nation in the rate of military and overseas ballots returned, and neither permits online ballot return

Read the article for more.

From WhoWhatWhy: Foreigners Could Hack U.S. Elections, Experts Say <read>

What if a foreign head of state had the power to handpick our next President? It sounds like the plot of a movie, but it actually might be in the realm of possibility.

Most people take our elections for granted. The few who don’t often suspect that one party might be trying to steal votes from the other. But they don’t envision that the theft could be coming from outside US borders.

What experts are telling us, though, is that our voting machines are so insecure that all elections, whether at the national, state, or local level, are vulnerable to being attacked by hackers in other countries.

We’ll add that maybe foreigners might scare some of the complacent, yet all these attacks could be done by Americans bent by many similar motives and more.

We also add a specific added threat on our shores of insider attack – those with access the the system who can, desire, or are intimidated into changing the results.

For example, Russia may want to prevent a hawk like John McCain, who wants weapons in the Ukraine and faces a tough battle for his job next fall, from getting reelected.

Israel’s leaders believe that the Iran nuclear deal would doom their country, so if they thought they could get away with it, would they try to put in office US representatives who share that view?…

This begs the question: Given that the security at some of our most protected institutions can be breached, and given that US elections pose an enticing target for our adversaries, what would prevent a foreign agent from hacking our ballot boxes?

The answer: Not much.

Experts indicate that the election systems in place today do not provide the adequate protection that would be able to stop a foreign hacker — a hacker anywhere, in fact — from rigging our races. Even worse, these attacks could go undetected…

Since such attacks can easily go unnoticed, evidence of remote hacks is scarce. But it’s likely they’re happening more than we know, considering that unencrypted connections over the open internet aren’t too hard for a knowledgeable college student to breach…

One report [on Internet voting], produced by computer scientists at the request of the Pentagon, examined a pilot iVoting project and concluded that an internet- and PC-based voting system presented “fundamental security problems” that couldn’t be fixed without a “radical breakthrough.”

Cyber attacks, the report concluded, “could occur on a large scale, and could be launched by anyone from a disaffected lone individual to a well-financed enemy agency outside the reach of U.S. law.”…

Despite its seemingly safe appearance, there are subtle ways the eVoting [polling place and central count voting] process could be susceptible to attack. For, in many cases, these systems actually do connect online.

John Sebes, CTO of the Open Source Elections Technology Foundation (OSET), told WhoWhatWhy that the most significant logistical issue for local officials is something called the election management system, or EMS.

As a component of the overall apparatus, the EMS is used for election data management and data entry — most likely on a PC in an elections office. Sebes said that, in theory, EMSs are never supposed to be online, but sometimes they get connected anyway. Not only do hackers then have the potential to breach election data on the PC, but malware could affect the removable media when it is taken out of the PC and inserted into the voting machines.

For now Connecticut is relatively safe from outsider attacks domestic and foreign.

While the Legislature voted for Internet voting, Secretary of the State Denise Merill maintained her staunch opposition, pointing out that Internet voting would violate our state constitutional requirement for a secret ballot. Fortunately, a constitutional amendment to change that died between committee and the floor, in 2014. It should stay that way.
Right now we do not connect our optical scanners to external equipment. In fact, their external ports are sealed. Memory cards are never in a device connected to the outside world. We do all our election results summary by addition and transcription from the printed scanner tapes. However, the Secretary of the State’s Office has plans for acquiring GEMs systems for municipalities to speed the electronic calculations of results. If, and its a big “if” right now, the GEMs systems are pristine, never were or never will be connected to the Internet, we would remain relatively safe from outsider attack. Stay tuned and involved!

Remember that we are still at risk of insider attacks, where our only protection would be adequate ballot security, audits, and recounts.

NonScience Nonsense, another claim of electronic voting security

In late June a respected source published a non-peer-reviewed article: The case for election technology Which despite its title is actually a marketing piece disguised as science, not for election technology but for electronic voting, including Internet voting. The case actually made is for skepticism and peer-review.

That skepticism is well addressed in posts by Jeremy Epstein and E. John Sebes: How not to measure security and A Hacked Case For Election Technology

In late June a respected source published a non-peer-reviewed article: The case for election technology <read>. Which despite its title is actually a marketing piece disguised as science, not for election technology but for electronic voting, including Internet voting. The case actually made is for skepticism and peer-review.

That skepticism is well addressed in posts by Jeremy Epstein and E. John Sebes: How not to measure security <read> and A Hacked Case For Election Technology <read>

From Epstein:

But the most outrageous statement in the article is this:

The important thing is that, when all of these methods [for providing voting system security] are combined, it becomes possible to calculate with mathematical precision the probability of the system being hacked in the available time, because an election usually happens in a few hours or at the most over a few days. (For example, for one of our average customers, the probability was 1×10-19. That is a point followed by 19 [sic] zeros and then 1). The probability is lower than that of a meteor hitting the earth and wiping us all out in the next few years—approximately 1×10-7 (Chemical Industry Education Centre, Risk-Ed n.d.)—hence it seems reasonable to use the term ‘unhackable’, to the chagrin of the purists and to my pleasure.

As noted previously, we don’t know how to measure much of anything in security, and we’re even less capable of measuring the results of combining technologies together (which sometimes makes things more secure, and other times less secure). The claim that putting multiple security measures together gives risk probabilities with “mathematical precision” is ludicrous. And calling any system “unhackable” is just ridiculous, as Oracle discovered some years ago when the marketing department claimed their products were “unhackable”. (For the record, my colleagues in engineering at Oracle said they were aghast at the slogan.)

As Ron Rivest said at a CITP symposium, if voting vendors have “solved the Internet security and cybersecurity problem, what are they doing implementing voting systems? They should be working with the Department of Defense or financial industry. These are not solved problems there.” If Smartmatic has a method for obtaining and measuring security with “mathematical precision” at the level of 1019, they should be selling trillions of dollars in technology or expertise to every company on the planet, and putting everyone else out of business.

We would add that just because an election happens over a short period is not a reason to claim any increased level of security or reduced vulnerability:

Programming election systems occurs months and weeks ahead of the election. Systems are vulnerable for their whole life up to and including each election. Its like saying air traffic control systems are not vulnerable to errors because directing each airplane occurs over a very short period of time in each control center. Of course that never happens.
And the rush to provide results quickly, all including the work of tired, lightly trained, technically challenged, and often partisan officials increases the vulnerability.
And the very suggestion of less vulnerability actually can have the effect of reducing vigilance, and increasing risk.

From Sebes:

I also disagree with most of Mugica’s comparisons between eVoting and paper voting because from a U.S. perspective (and I admit this review is all from a U.S.-centric viewpoint) it’s comparing the wrong two things: paperless eVoting verses hand-marked hand-counted paper ballots. It ignores the actual systems that are the most widely used for election integrity in the U.S.

Now, perhaps Mugica’s argument is for eVoting more broadly, without insisting on the paperless part. But in that case, most of America already has some form of eVoting, using voting machines and paper ballots or records, coupled with some form of paper ballot audit to detect malfunctioning machines. In that case, you don’t need to claim mythical security properties along with implied mythical perfect performance. If some equipment doesn’t work right – whether from hacks or good old fashioned software bugs – the audit can detect and correct the results.

1. The Article Misses the Point

This paper completely misses the point that it is not paper-voting vs. electronic-voting, but rather that each is insufficient. In reality, transparent (in technology and process), accurate, secure, and verifiable elections require a combination of people + paper + process + computers, each cross-checking the other. The majority of U.S. election officials now commonly understand this as the norm. Either that, or the author assumes that eVoting includes support for ballot audit (more below), and is arguing against paper-only hand-count elections—a practice that is no longer relevant in the U.S.

2. The Article Ignores Common U.S. Election Practices

“The security of a paper-based, manual vote with a manual count is extremely low. Single copies of each vote make them easy to tamper with or destroy.”

True, but only for the most procedurally simple methods of conducting hand counts or hand audits. Just last week, the state of Wisconsin conducted a public manual ballot audit that was a model of transparency and integrity.

Security is not the main issue for either hand count or machine count. Accuracy is.

We have long held that optical scan, including strong ballot security, sufficient audits and recounts is the best available system today.

Consensus Reached on Recommendations Toward the Future of Internet Voting

The U.S. Vote Foundation has released a report on the feasibility and requirements for Internet voting. This is the result of about eighteen months of work by computer scientists, security experts, and election officials. The goal was to answer definitively once and for all if Internet voting was feasible today or in the future.

The short version is the Internet voting is not ready for prime time, not ready for democracy. Yet, it is possible in the future that a system may be developed which could provide safe Internet voting. The paper lays out the requirements and testing criteria for such a system.

(Internet voting includes online voting, email voting, and fax voting).

The U.S. Vote Foundation has released a report on the feasibility and requirements for Internet voting: <press release> <report summary> <full report> This is the result of about eighteen months of work by computer scientists, security experts, and election officials. The goal was to answer definitively once and for all if Internet voting was feasible today or in the future.

(Internet voting includes online voting, email voting, and fax voting).

From the press release:

Developed by a team of the nation’s leading experts in election integrity, election administration, high-assurance systems engineering, and cryptography, the report starts from the premise that public elections in the U.S. are a matter of national security. The authors assert that Internet voting systems must be transparent and designed to run in a manner that embraces the constructs of end-to-end verifiability – a property missing from existing Internet voting systems…

As election technology evolves and more states evaluate Internet voting, caution on compromises to integrity and security is warranted, and according to the report, should be particularly avoided by the premature deployment of Internet voting. The report aims to list the security challenges that exist with Internet voting and emphasizes that research should continue as the threat landscape continues to shift. Existing proprietary systems that meet only a subset of the requirements cannot be considered secure enough for use in the U.S.

Key recommendations in the report to make Internet voting more secure and transparent include:

Any public elections conducted over the Internet must be end-to-end verifiable
End-to-End Verifiable systems must be in-person and supervised first
End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting systems must be high assurance
End-to-End Verifiable Internet Voting systems must be usable and accessible to all voters
Maintain aggressive election R&D efforts

I would recommend that anyone supporting Internet voting read the Press Release, Summary, and Full Report and then recruit experts of equal credibility to do the work and make an equally compelling case refuting this report

Top security official, spouts NonScience Nonsense

Comey’s problem is the nearly universal agreement among cryptographers, technologists and security experts that there is no way to give the government access to encrypted communications without poking an exploitable hole that would put confidential data, as well as entities like banks and power grids, at risk.

We are used to climate change deniers ignoring science and ridiculing scientists. Like frogs in slowly warming water, we are no longer surprised when members of Congress deny science, or members of the public and election officials tout “safe” Internet voting, despite the science showing impossibility of security and the almost daily headlines of serious security failures.

Now we have the Director of the FBI directly contradicting top security scientists – when his job actually requires him to be an informed champion of actual security. This NonScience Nonsense is best summed up in an article this week in The Intercept: FBI Director Says Scientists Are Wrong, Pitches Imaginary Solution to Encryption Dilemma <read>

Testifying before two Senate committees on Wednesday about the threat he says strong encryption presents to law enforcement, FBI Director James Comey didn’t so much propose a solution as wish for one.
Comey said he needs some way to read and listen to any communication for which he’s gotten a court order. Modern end-to-end encryption — increasingly common following the revelations of mass surveillance by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden — doesn’t allow for that. Only the parties on either end can do the decoding.

Comey’s problem is the nearly universal agreement among cryptographers, technologists and security experts that there is no way to give the government access to encrypted communications without poking an exploitable hole that would put confidential data, as well as entities like banks and power grids, at risk.

In my early teens, a friend who did not do well in school smoked. It was a time when the dangers of smoking were just becoming public, with heavy and obviously false denial by the tobacco companies. My friend said “If they are right, by the time I would get cancer, the scientists will have come up with a cure.” At that time there was a lot of blind faith in science, cheered on by the media, that anything was possible – like curing cancer, going to the moon, or flying cars in cities of the future. Science frequently surprises us with miraculous developments, yet there are no miracles. We have no cities of the future, we have not gone to the moon, hunger has not been cured, leisure and the middle class are endangered along with the planet. Yet, we have miraculous cell phones and the Internet, along with inaccurate and distorted ideas of risks and fears. Some fears are overblown and unjustified, while in other areas we have a false sense of security.

Director Comey runs an agency which for years has claimed unquestioned expertise in matching fingerprints, blood samples, and hair samples, all of which have proven highly inaccurate, with little proof of accuracy in practice or in theory.

Sadly and dangerously, Comey’s blind faith combined in scientists coupled with distrust of those same scientists is matched by many in Congress:

Comey said American technologists are so brilliant that they surely could come up with a solution if properly incentivized.

Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, was incredulous about Comey’s insistence that experts are wrong: “How does his head not explode from cognitive dissonance when he repeats he has no tech expertise, then insists everyone who does is wrong?” he tweeted during the hearing.

Prior to the committee hearings, a group of the world’s foremost cryptographers and scientists wrote a paper including complex technical analysis concluding that mandated backdoor keys for the government would only be dangerous for national security. This is the first time the group has gotten back together since 1997, the previous instance in which the FBI asked for a technical backdoor into communications.

But no experts were invited to testify, a fact that several intelligence committee members brought up, demanding a second hearing to hear from them.

Hopefully Congress will hear from scientists – scientists who represent objective, predominant security expertise – and Congress will listen to them.

“Security online today, is not up to the task of online voting today.”

My friend, Duncan Buell, sent along a .pdf with a blog post of his, Computer Security and the Risks of Online Voting, along with another blog post about drones Meet A.I. Joe

My friend, Duncan Buell, sent along a .pdf with a blog post of his, Computer Security and the Risks of Online Voting, along with another blog post about drones Meet A.I. Joe <read>

They are both worth reading and contemplating. Duncan’s focus is on the unique responsibility of computer scientists to warn the World of the dangers of Internet/Online voting. It is also a quick, high-level introduction to the relevant history and arguments:

many election officials around the country and around the world seem enchanted with the marketing hype of Internet voting software vendors and are buying in to the notion that we could—and should—vote online now and in the very near future.
Never mind the almost-daily reports of data breaches of financial organizations with deep pockets to spend on securing their computers. Never mind that governments, with shallower pockets, are routinely hacked…Election officials seem in awe of ill-defined vendor terms like “military-grade encryption.”…
Many U.S. states are toying with the notion of online voting, contracting their elections to private companies whose code has never been given a public vetting. As scientists, we would all probably rather be doing science than trying to find ways to convince the public and election officials that security online today is not up to the task of voting online today.

The second article highlights a risk similar to one that I have been contemplating myself, the take over of drones by opposing forces. In short we could fund and provide an enemy, including terrorists the power to defeat, kill, and terrorize us:

Even worse, can robots be hacked? The Iranians claim to have hacked an American drone and brought it down safely on their territory back in 2011.However it happened, they have it, and refused to return it when President Obama somewhat cheekily asked for it back. This incident should prompt us to consider the question: What if robots could be taken over and turned on their masters?

My concern is that if cars can be hacked, why not police vehicles, especially, those armored military vehicles now in the hands of our local police?

Data Breach Today – Infinite Future Harm!

From the Intercept, an explanation of the harm of data retention and theft: Data Theft Today Poses Indefinite Threat of “Future Harm”

We hear continuous claims that “I have nothing to hide, so who cares if they have my data”. Lets look at what might actually happen. The possibilities are endless.

From the Intercept, an explanation of the harm of data retention and theft: Data Theft Today Poses Indefinite Threat of “Future Harm” <read>

We hear continuous claims that “I have nothing to hide, so who cares if they have my data”. Lets look at what might actually happen:

Benjamin Nuss was one of the nearly 80 million people whose social security number and personal information were compromised in this year’s Anthem data breach. He seems to have taken things in stride, continuing his daily routine of sharing computer time with his brother, eating healthy snacks and making crafts. Benjamin is four years old.

While it may seem trivial to think about the harm a preschooler will suffer from a data breach, the question is not what happens to him now, but what will happen years from now. Data theft poses an indefinite threat of future harm, as birthdate, full name and social security number remain a skeleton key of identity in many systems…

If the hackers pursue next steps in cyberespionage, they are likely to use the records they’ve acquired, cross-hatched with information from credit databases and even social media, to see who is vulnerable to blackmail or bribery for financial or personal reasons…

A first-person article by William Gerrity published two years ago by Slate and the website Zócalo Public Square gives a vivid picture of what may lie ahead for those targeted. In 2007, Gerrity was checking his email after a long day working as a real estate developer in Shanghai. “The message greeted me by a nickname known only to family and close friends,” he wrote, “and it contained a proposal: I could pay 1 million renminbi (about $150,000 at the time), in exchange for which the sender would not forward the attachments to my business partners or competitors.”

In this case, the hackers had obtained confidential business documents, as well as personal correspondence about the death of his mother. The FBI advised him to refuse the request, which he did. But imagine that the request was not for payment in cash, but in federal information. And imagine the trade was not in business documents, but evidence of misconduct or criminal behavior on or off the job. That’s bait, if acquired and used, that could be harder for some to refuse…

In fact, federal officials later acknowledged that the OPM breach included what’s called a Standard Form-86, on which new hires (including military and intelligence officials) must reveal details that could make them vulnerable to blackmail or influence, including prior drug use, financial woes, and criminal convictions. The form also asks for ties to citizens of other countries; thus the hackers, if they are Chinese, would quickly be able to determine who has friends and family in their country…

The possibilities are endless, or infinite as the article says. Lets just say:

A teen commits a crime due to negligence, error, or immature intention. It hurts another person, it would be embarrassing and could have a huge criminal penalty.
An adult commits a sexual, consenting indiscretion.
Even unknown to a person, they make an material error in a business transaction. For instance a mortgage application, or real estate listing that causes another person or organization significant harm.
Such could be used to intimidate that individual at any time. Especially if they become a prominent public or private decision maker. Especially a law maker, chief executive, department head, Cabinet Member, Judge, regulator or President. Or even a person attaining a lower level critical position, with security clearances or control over government contracts.
Actually, the individual could be,unknowingly, groomed for that position by others who have that information, ready to use at the appropriate time.
Perhaps the individual was setup to commit the crime or indiscretion. Perhaps it never actually happened, yet there is enough of a long buried false record, created for this specific purpose.

Read the article for more details on the risks and the legal issues surrounding this. Be very careful before you ever sign on to accepting a settlement in a class action suit for a data breech.

Net of Insecurity — risks not anticipated by Founders

The Washington Post has a new set of articles, interviewing some of the founders of the Internet on how the it came to be built with insufficient security:

“I believe that we don’t know how to solve these problems today, so the idea that we could have solved them 30, 40 years ago is silly,”…

“They thought they were building a classroom, and it turned into a bank.”

The Washington Post has a new set of articles, interviewing some of the founders of the Internet on how the it came to be built with insufficient security: Net of Insecurity <read>

“I believe that we don’t know how to solve these problems today, so the idea that we could have solved them 30, 40 years ago is silly,” said David H. Crocker, who started working on computer networking in the early 1970s and helped develop modern e-mail systems…

“People don’t break into banks because they’re not secure. They break into banks because that’s where the money is,” said Abbate, author of “Inventing the Internet,” on the network and its creators.

She added, “They thought they were building a classroom, and it turned into a bank.”

ddfss