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Should We Ignore the South Carolina Election Hacking Story? (securityledger.com)
chicksdaddy provides five (or more) "good" reasons why we should ignore the South Carolina election hacking story that was reported yesterday. According to yesterday's reports, South Carolina's voter-registration system was hit with nearly 150,000 hack attempts on election day. Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes from an opinion piece via The Security Ledger: What should we make of the latest reports from WSJ, The Hill, etc. that South Carolina's election systems were bombarded with 150,000 hacking attempts? Not much, argues Security Ledger in a news analysis that argues there are lots of good reasons to ignore this story, if not the very real problem of election hacking. The stories were based on this report from The South Carolina Election Commission. The key phrase in that report is "attempts to penetrate," Security Ledger notes. Information security professionals would refer to that by more mundane terms like "port scans" or probes. These are kind of the "dog bites man" stories of the cyber beat -- common (here's one from 2012 US News & World Report) but ill informed. "The kinds of undifferentiated scans that the report is talking about are the internet equivalent of people driving slowly past your house." While some of those 150,000 attempts may well be attempts to hack South Carolina's elections systems, many are undifferentiated, while some may be legitimate, if misdirected. Whatever the case, they're background noise on the internet and hardly unique to South Carolina's voter registration systems. They're certainly not evidence of sophisticated, nation-state efforts to crack the U.S. election system by Russia, China or anyone else, Security Ledger argues. "The problem with lumping all these 'hacking attempts' in the same breath as you talk about sophisticated and targeted attacks on the Clinton Campaign, the DCCC, and successful penetration of some state election boards is that it dramatically distorts the nature and scope of the threat to the U.S. election system which -- again -- is very real." The election story is one "that demands thoughtful and pointed reporting that can explore (and explode) efforts by foreign actors to subvert the U.S. vote and thus its democracy," the piece goes on to argue. "That's especially true in an environment in which regulators and elected officials seem strangely incurious about such incidents and disinclined to investigate them."
Perfectly willing to claim Trump was elected from vote hacking, utterly unwilling to investigate or question any votes - and in fact attempts to block those seeking to investigate voter hacking.
Perfectly willing to ignore that the actual hacking that Democrats are concerned about was related to breaking into email accounts for Democrats, not elections computers (except that one time you have a freakout over one in Georgia), utterly unwilling to admit that Trump's claim of five million illegals voters was bullshit, and in fact, downplays the exaggerated hysterical nature of the GOP noise brigade.
It is absurd to ignore how the GOP has been found by numerous courts to have deliberately targeted selected mechanisms of ID because the opposing voting base uses them, when the GOP is found by numerous courts to have engaged in excessive gerrymandering that far exceed that in Maryland, when the Republicans in the Arizona Legislature refused to abide by the will of the people for a non-partisan districting Commission, that you are actually concerned with the voters or rigged elections.
Maybe you should think about that, if you want people to believe you have even the slimmest shred of integrity.
Besides, the distict attorney in North Carolina who refused to prosecute a woman who voted for her dead mother was a Republican.
By the partizan electoral officials that control them. Heck, the Diabold machine was even found to have and "Adjust Votes" option on the menu, no need for any actual hacking.
It amazes me that Americans put up with this grossly dubious system.
I am sure that the Australian election was not hacked. I was one of the scrutineers who watched while every paper ballot (at a particular booth) was tallied. And then forwarded those subtotals on to the candidate themselves. No fuss. No court cases. Just transparency.
Story for you
Its also a non-partsian fact that not a SINGLE person is willing to testify in court that they have seen evidence of hacking the election.
Under oath, Comey said the DNC refused the FBI's help in checking their servers. The company the DNC did hire is a DNC shell company that said the Russians did it. That company is also unwilling to testify that Russia did it now after some more information came out about them. That leaves the FBI with no ACTUAL evidence of Russia doing anything. When asked why Comey still thought it was Russia he said, and I shit you not, "It just makes sense".
Yea, there is no evidence anywhere. Glad to see you posting DNC talking points that have been thoroughly debunked, but I'm sure it won't stop you.