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Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

utahpolicy.com

101–110 of 220 posts

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first is a good idea, but the second is not. Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote and thus compromise elections. In person fraud is very uncommon, and it would be very difficult for a foreign government to pull off a large scale interference without being detected. After all, we struggle to get people to show up to vote once already! The idea of mass ballot fraud seems difficult to count…

Voting requires ID in almost every other western democracy, including Canada. The rest of the world see it as very reasonable to identify yourself at a polling station. It's odd that this is so contentious in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_ID_laws

Looking at the description of Canada, it looks similar to how the US has worked.

The general thing people have wanted to avoid is an extra burden that burdens poor voters. Either an ID that costs money (poll taxes are banned in many countries, so this is always a little dubious), or that simply requires going to a distant or understaffed facility to get the ID.

The only reason it's a political issue at all is because the Republican party has been rather openly seeking these negative effects to their electoral benefit: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-ackno...

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea why this has become a right vs left, polarized issue.

It's because the right benefits from low turnout. The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority, benefits from large turnout. The Democratic party, a center left or center right party depending on who you talk to, has co-opted the left voter base and thereby depends on higher turnout during general elections. As a centrist party, they intentionally suppress turnout during primary elections (e.g. by…

>The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority.

No party is currently doing this unless you include third parties. The American left works for business too.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#103
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The hysteria around double or fraudulent voting is crazy. You’d need thousands of people doing it in most districts to have any impact, and that would get obvious really bloody quickly. I think this is a pretty good example of what I find to be the typical of an American practice of cutting off their own nose to spite their face. [1] Americans absolutely hate the idea of freeloaders or someone getting somethin…

>Americans Yeah well not all of us, thanks.

On behalf of USians, I apologize for monopolizing the word "Americans" when two entire continents have a right to the word.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#104
post #21

Paper ballots, no machines and especially no machines connected to the internet...if we were able to get that crazy bug into Iranian nuclear reactors without direct transfer from Internet, then you can bet North Korea, Russia, Israel, and China will pour billions to do the same thing. Voting ID cards too, though I admit I don’t know enough about that. Even if it costs billions to get it done, confidence in fair and f…

[deleted]

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#105
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly I smell FUD virtually every time a security engineer opens his mouth. Yes there are some great ones, but I’ve never worked with one directly. Part of my skepticism is rooted in the prevalent ignorance of basic computing theory. If you can’t define the operational semantics of a system then you can’t rigorously convince yourself or anyone else that it is “secure.”

Honestly, a lot of systems have enough low-hanging fruit that formalizing the semantics is probably not worth it. Can people outside this small list get a shell on your server? Then it's not secure. Let's start there.

That’s a well said example and actually very easy to establish formally by complementation. I don't really care if Hoare notation, the predicate calculus, or even English is the language of choice, so long as the argument is rigorous. That said we all know how difficult avoiding ambiguity is in English, so I wouldn’t choose it except for the broad strokes.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Port knocking is security by obscurity. How about a VPN like a real company.

Google famously ditched VPNs because you can’t trust the inside networks either. https://www.blog.google/products/google-cloud/how-use-beyond...

Sure but it still adds another layer.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#107

Frankly, 18 feels low. I would expect the number to be 10x or even 100x that.

I made the same error in reading the link text (which is not representative of the article linked to).

It's rather a dumb way to abbreviate one billion.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#108
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is they're including requests for / A billion "hacks" per day seems a bit far fetched. At that point, it's either a visible act of war (if external to the US) or the FBI would be much more involved (if internal). Both of those would be much larger news.

Wouldn't it be a good estimator to include ANY connections coming outside of Utah? I hope that whoever is attempting to hack the Utah voting system has no nefarious purpose greater than changing "Mitt" to "Mittens.

It would be like calling every individual connection made during a DDOS event an "attack". No, it's one attack. The number of connections merely indicates the size of the attack, and in this case possibly less because if it's implementing a brute force search over passwords, it could be very, very inefficient.

In other words, it's marketing language designed to scare people who have no understanding of computer security.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because the right benefits from low turnout. The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority, benefits from large turnout. The Democratic party, a center left or center right party depending on who you talk to, has co-opted the left voter base and thereby depends on higher turnout during general elections. As a centrist party, they intentionally suppress turnout during primary elections (e.g. by…

>The left, representing the interests of the proletarian majority. No party is currently doing this unless you include third parties. The American left works for business too.

Agreed. These are all symptoms of capitalist dominance.

Re: Utah voting system fending off 1B hacking attempts per day

#110
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Voter ID cards are historically used to make it harder to vote Is that the case in the numerous other countries that require voter ID? I find it funny how we always use “but every other country does it!” when talking about things the US should adopt (e.g., the metric system, socialized healthcare), but that’s apparently not a good reason when talking about voter ID. Even countries with far poorer populations than o…

I have no idea why this has become a right vs left, polarized issue.

It's been that way since the civil rights movement and the republican southern strategy. Minorities, with very good reason, tend to vote against the republicans. This means someone holding household level demographic data knows exactly which neighborhoods to target if they're willing to use suppression tactics. And that's exactly what we've seen happening.
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