2016 Presidential Candidate Security Investigation (infosecinstitute.com)

New submitter Fryan writes: InfoSec Institute has assessed the security posture of 16 of the presidential candidates' websites. This is an indicator of the level of security awareness the candidate and the campaign staff has. The recent breaches and security lapses of high profile individuals highlight the absolute need for everyone to take security awareness seriously. The hacking of the Director of the CIA's (John Brennan) personal email account, and the storage of classified emails on a personal email server with Hillary Clinton, show how damaging a lack of basic good security hygiene can be. In this survey (of only the best known presidential candidates, not the scads of others), the authors give both their highest grade (an A) and lowest (a D) for candidates still in the race to two Republicans, Ben Carson and Jim Gilmore, respectively; surprising for a tech-focused campaign, Lawrence Lessig (who has ended his candidacy since the survey began) ranked even lower, with a D-.

Speaking of presidential candidates, the fourth Republican debate, hosted by Fox Business, will kick off about an hour after this post goes live (9:00 PM Eastern, 0200 GMT). Feel free to discuss it alongside the security report.

Comments

We're not the MSM

[Okian Warrior]

Given that the Donald wants to force Christian law the entire USA [...]

This is what I *hate* about political debate in this country. It's all sock-puppetry by people making unbased predictions about the other candidates. In previous elections, it started about 6 weeks before the election. At 2 weeks before, it reached fever pitch.

Everyone and their dog argues back and forth "if *the other guy* get elected, they'll eat your babies and cancel Christmas!!!"

Don't tell me what they *want*, and don't tell me what they'll *do*. Tell me what they *did*. Tell me what they *said*.

Base your rhetoric on concrete information - what people have *done* and *said* - and maybe I'll listen. Saying that the democrats will raise taxes, that the republicans will kill social security, is simple guesswork by "some dude on the net".

Trump said "wages too high", that's true - but what were the previous 3 words in that sentence?

The totality of what he said, all six words and the following words to the end of the sentence, are worthy of discussion. The excised 3-words are not - that's just a childish emotional appeal.

OH NO!!! Trump wants to reduce our wages!!!

We're not the mainstream media, we're better than that. Let's have an honest and real discussion instead of childish pot-shots.

Re:More live-debate commenting

[drinkypoo]

As a biomedical research scientist who values individual freedom, Obama's stifling of (direct-to-consumer) personal genomics - e.g. what the FDA did to 23andMe - is going to make it very hard for me to vote for any of the "centrist" Democrats.

As a person concerned with privacy, I cannot imagine why anyone would use 23andMe.

One of the reasons I voted for Obama was that he was billed as a scholar of constitutional law - who would presumably believe in freedom of speech

Don't presume.

Supposedly Obama deserves all kinds of credit for reforming healthcare in the USA, but all he really did was layer on additional bureaucracy

That's what government does.

Would the Republicans be better? Probably not. But the centrist Democrats sure ain't heroes either.

Correct. They're mostly a bunch of assholes. People with the courage to actually be far-left (or even far-right) are typically drummed out of government in a hot second.