as the election is close, 10 states have recently been probed by actors

The election is one day away. This means that the actors are now in full swing to try and make the election as difficult as possible.

To do this, they’ll stop at nothing. I earlier saw an article that talked about the fact that the actors sent an email subset to residents in Florida, known as a swing state, to get them to vote for Donald Trump. The email in question we don’t know what it looked like, but should be found and examined. Nobody should be threatening people to vote for one candidate over another.

In today’s piece, we’re going to learn a little abot the Iranian people, and how they probed election systems in 10 different states. To my knowledge and understanding, this could be the beginning of the whole ordeal but we may never know for sure.

“We have confirmed that in at least one state the threat actor did obtain [access] to a voter registration database by abusing a website misconfiguration,”
he said. “We are aware of the specific states that were targeted in this activity and we’re actively coordinating with those states currently to ensure
proper remediation.”

The suspected Iranian hackers have been attempting to exploit known software vulnerabilities in their search for voter data, federal officials said. They
did not say which states were targeted. An FBI official on the briefing said attackers had probed websites in 10 states.

“We weren’t able to attribute all of this activity to the same threat actor,” but there was overlap in IP addresses, IP ranges, virtual private network
exit nodes, and other technical data, Roebuck said.

So we’ve learned that through this set of paragraphs that it started through a misconfiguration of the web server, something that happens way too often now a days than I’d like to count. We’ve got to get better with people configuring web servers to make sure they are as secure as possible. There’s no perfect solution, I know, but if you have it as secure as you understand to make it, you’re ahead of the game.

There is no evidence that any of the activity has affected voting procedures, and U.S. officials stressed that the integrity of the vote is protected.
CISA and the FBI used the briefing to encourage state and local officials to harden their IT systems days before Election Day. “We know that activity is
out there, we know the steps” you can take to address it, said Matt Masterson, a CISA senior adviser.

With voting underway across the country, U.S. officials have publicly attributed a series of foreign cyber campaigns related to the elections sector. It’s
a federal effort to be more transparent about foreign threats compared to 2016, and at the same time reassure voters their ballots are being protected.

My vote is protected by your choice or hurry to set up the web server? That means my name, phone number, and email address may be tied to the whole thing and while we’ve talked about election voting machines having flaws that will probably never be solved, this gives me piece of mind to think about registering to vote.

I’ve got my reasons why I am not registered to vote and its beyond the scope of this blog. I’ve thought about it during the last few years, but I still say no, and now, I wonder if that is a good thing.

The FBI and CISSA have released statements about this, and I’m happy they’re being more transparent about what people are doing with our election systems.

Would you like to read more about this story from Cyberscoop? Iranian hackers probed election-related websites in 10 states, US officials say is the article and it does link to the various publications by the FBI, Cissa, and other things as well.

Let your voice be heard if you’re voting, and don’t be intimidated by the emails saying you should vote for the candidate you don’t want to vote for. They’re not going to come and arrest you, beat you up, or do anything to your family because chances are, they’re too far away. It may be a possibility, but it doesn’t make sense to do that if they send broad email like Florida’s article said. Thanks so much for reading!

Iranian Advanced Persistent Threat Actor Identified Obtaining Voter Registration Data Alert (AA20-304A) should be read too.