Tyb
Yes. My barrister is on retainer.
Ahead Of 2020, Microsoft Unveils Tool To Allow Voters To Track Their Ballots
A "vote here" sign marks the entrance to an early voting station in downtown Minneapolis in 2018.
Steve Karnowski/AP
From checking in at a polling place on a tablet to registering to vote by smartphone to using an electronic voting machine to cast a ballot, computers have become an increasingly common part of voting in America.
But the underlying technology behind some of those processes is often a black box. Private companies, not state or local governments, develop and maintain most of the software and hardware that keep democracy chugging along. That has kept journalists, academics and even lawmakers from speaking with certainty about election security.
In an effort to improve confidence in elections, Microsoft announced Monday that it is releasing an open-source software development kit called ElectionGuard that will use encryption techniques to let voters know when their vote is counted. It will also allow election officials and third parties to verify election results to make sure there was no interference with the results.
"It's very much like the cybersecurity version of a tamper-proof bottle," said Tom Burt, Microsoft's vice president of customer security and trust, in an interview with NPR. "Tamper-proof bottles don't prevent any hack of the contents of the bottle, but it makes it makes it harder, and it definitely reveals when the tampering has occurred."
Developed with the computer science company Galois, the kit will be available free of charge for election technology vendors to incorporate into their voting systems.
Microsoft is partnering with a number of voting machine vendors, including the largest manufacturer in the country, Election Systems & Software, but it's unclear how extensively the industry will use the new software in its offerings. The voting machine industry has traditionally been tight-lipped about its security practices.
Galois plans to use the new technology as part of an open-source voting system it is designing with grant money from the Defense Department. That system won't be for sale, says Joe Kiniry, a principal scientist at Galois. Instead, it will serve as a model of a secure voting system that private companies can build off of.
"It gives the ability to double-check, even if a system is terribly written, even if it's hackable, it gets detected," said Kiniry. "It's not magic pixie dust. We need this plus unhackable systems."
The software works in tandem with voting systems that use paper ballots, which many states and counties are returning to after more than a decade of using touchscreen voting machines that didn't produce a paper receipt.
An election system using Microsoft's ElectionGuard would provide a voter with a unique code that would not reveal who or what they voted for. The code could then be used to follow the vote from the moment the voter casts it, after the voter has verified the selections are correct, to the moment it's counted.
"For voters, the most tangible thing they would see from this is they would now have the ability to track the ballot as it goes through the entire process," said Joe Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "Similar to what voters have with packages, or pizza, it will say this is at this facility, it has been counted."
Microsoft's Burt says he expects to see pilot use of the technology in the 2020 election, but because of how long certification and incorporation of new technology takes in voting, realistically, he hopes for "broad deployment" by 2024.
But that deployment will be only as broad as tight state and local government budgets allow.
"This will help voters track their votes; it's going to build in this audibility that's sort of the holy grail," Hall said. "But it's not going to reach the smaller jurisdictions that don't have the money to upgrade or have older equipment."
https://www.npr.org/2019/05/06/720071488/ahead-of-2020-microsoft-unveils-tool-to-allow-voters-to-track-their-ballots
Dominion Voting Systems Partners
DENVER, Colorado USA (HQ)
Dominion Voting Systems is a full service election partner providing technology, project management, support, and training to our global elections customers. Our clients’ interests, and those of the citizens they serve always come first and, above all, we do not stop until our partners are successful.
Our products include:
– Election Management Systems
– Central Count Systems
– Precinct Count Systems
– Accessible Voting Systems
Dominion Voting Systems has been a Microsoft Gold Partner for four years and has earned Microsoft Competencies in Application Development.
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Russian and Chinese hackers targeting U.S. vote, Microsoft warns
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Microsoft said Thursday that the same Russian military intelligence outfit that hacked the Democrats in 2016 has been trying to break into more than 200 organizations in recent weeks, including political parties and consultants. | AP
AFP-JIJI
Sep 11, 2020WASHINGTON – Microsoft said Thursday it thwarted recent cyberattacks from China, Russia and Iran targeting both Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns, as technology giants scrambled to protect election security less than two months ahead of the U.S. vote.
The announcement came as Twitter said it would implement a policy next week to remove “false or misleading information intended to undermine public confidence in an election,” including unverified claims of victory; and Google said it would take steps to ensure its “auto complete” search feature doesn’t make such misguided suggestions.
Microsoft said that attackers have been targeting staff from the campaigns of President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
“In recent weeks, Microsoft has detected cyberattacks targeting people and organizations involved in the upcoming presidential election,” said corporate vice president Tom Burt.
It was clear that “foreign activity groups have stepped up their efforts targeting the 2020 election as had been anticipated,” according to Burt.
The attackers have targeted political operatives, think tanks, consultants and political parties in Europe as well, Microsoft said.
It identified a Russia-based group called Strontium which Burt said “has attacked more than 200 organizations,” and China-based Zirconium, which he said “has attacked high-profile individuals associated with the election, including people associated with the Joe Biden for President campaign and prominent leaders in the international affairs community.”
An Iran-based group dubbed Phosphorus has been targeting personal accounts of people associated with the Trump campaign, Microsoft said.
The majority of those attacks were stopped by Microsoft security tools, and those targeted or compromised were alerted, according to Burt.
Russia is trying to undermine voters’ faith in the U.S. electoral system and especially in voting by mail ahead of the Nov. 3 election, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analysis.
A statement in August from the National Counterintelligence and Security Center said Russia is actively working against Biden’s candidacy, favoring Trump as it did in 2016.
Microsoft’s announcement affirms DHS warnings that “China, Iran, and Russia are trying to undermine our democracy and influence our elections,” acting secretary Chad Wolf said in a prepared statement.
Twitter policy taking effect Sept. 17 bans “false or misleading information” about voting as well as “disputed claims that could undermine faith in the process itself,” such as allegations of election rigging, ballot tampering, vote tallying or certification of election results.
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The move comes amid rising concerns about when results will be verified for the presidential election, in view of an expected large volume of mail-in ballots — the integrity of which Trump has spent months attacking.
The policy prohibits “misleading claims about the results” or interference with the electoral process such as “claiming victory before election results have been certified, inciting unlawful conduct to prevent a peaceful transfer of power or orderly succession.”
Some analysts have suggested that Trump may reject the election results or refuse to leave office if he loses, while Trump himself has spent months suggesting Democrats were attempting to “rig” the election and refusing to say whether he will accept the results.
Both Twitter and Facebook have placed labels on Trump posts about on mail-in voting — sent out to his tens of millions of followers.
“We will not permit our service to be abused around civic processes, most importantly elections,” Twitter said.
“Any attempt to do so — both foreign and domestic — will be met with strict enforcement of our rules, which are applied equally and judiciously for everyone.”
Google announced separately it would tighten controls for its “autocomplete” search feature to guard against misinformation.
“We will remove predictions that could be interpreted as claims for or against any candidate or political party,” said Pandu Nayak, vice president of search.
“We will also remove predictions that could be interpreted as a claim about participation in the election — like statements about voting methods, requirements, or the status of voting locations — or the integrity or legitimacy of electoral processes, such as the security of the election.”
This will rule out predictions such as “you can vote by phone,” Nayak said.
Social media operators have been struggling with disinformation campaigns from Russia, China and other countries along with unverified claims by Trump on the vote process.
Facebook said last month it was bracing for efforts by Trump or others to attack the integrity of the U.S. election.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/09/11/world/russian-chinese-hackers-us-voting-microsoft/
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Microsoft will give away software to guard U.S. voting machines
The tech giant says it has tracked more than 700 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries against U.S. political organizations so far this election cycle.
A voter casts his primary vote in Hialeah, Florida, on Aug. 30, 2016.Alan Diaz / AP file
July 17, 2019, 5:00 PM EDT
By Ken Dilanian
ASPEN, Colo. — Microsoft on Wednesday announced that it would give away software designed to improve the security of American voting machines, even as the tech giant said it had tracked 781 cyberattacks by foreign adversaries targeting political organizations so far this election cycle.
The company said it was rolling out the free, open-source software product called ElectionGuard, which it said uses encryption to "enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting." The company is working with election machine vendors and local governments to deploy the system in a pilot program for the 2020 election.
The system uses an encrypted tracking code to allow a voter to verify that his or her vote has been recorded and has not been tampered with, Microsoft said in a blog post.
Its announcement was timed to coincide with the Aspen Security Forum, an annual conference of current and former intelligence, defense and homeland security officials that kicks off Wednesday in Aspen, Colorado — co-sponsored by Microsoft and others. NBC News is a media partner of the forum.
Edward Perez, an election security expert with the independent Open Source Election Technology Institute, said Microsoft's move signals that voting systems, long a technology backwater, are finally receiving attention from the county's leading technical minds.
"We think that it's good when a technology provider as significant as Microsoft is stepping into something as nationally important as election security," Perez told NBC News. "ElectionGuard does provide verification and it can help to detect attacks. It's important to note that detection is different from prevention."
Perez said that about 30 percent of America's registered voters currently live in counties with voting systems that have no auditable paper trail, a situation that he and other election experts say poses an unacceptable risk. An election security bill that could help counties install more security systems by providing $600 million to the states has passed the House but has been held up in the Senate by Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
Microsoft said it has notified almost 10,000 customers in the past year that they've been targeted or compromised by nation-state cyberattacks. About 84 percent of the attacks targeted enterprise customers — generally at organizations — and about 16 percent targeted consumer personal email accounts, the company said.
"While many of these attacks are unrelated to the democratic process, this data demonstrates the significant extent to which nation-states continue to rely on cyberattacks as a tool to gain intelligence, influence geopolitics, or achieve other objectives," the firm said in the blog post.
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The majority of the suspected nation-state attacks came from Iran, North Korea and Russia, Microsoft said.
Last August, Microsoft rolled out a service it calls AccountGuard, now in use in 26 countries on four continents. The company provides it free to current candidates for federal, state and local offices in the United States and their campaigns, the campaign organizations of all sitting members of Congress, national and state party committees, technology vendors who primarily serve campaigns and committees, and certain nonprofit organizations and nongovernmental organizations. Microsoft AccountGuard is offered free of charge. Organizations must be using Microsoft's Office 365 software suite to register.
Since then, the company said it has made 781 notifications of nation-state attacks targeting organizations participating in AccountGuard — 95 percent of which targeted U.S.-based organizations.
"Many of the democracy-focused attacks we've seen recently target NGOs and think tanks and reflect a pattern that we also observed in the early stages of some previous elections," Microsoft said. "A spike in attacks on NGOs and think tanks that work closely with candidates and political parties, or work on issues central to their campaigns, serves as a precursor to direct attacks on campaigns and election systems themselves."
Echoing the warnings of U.S. intelligence officials, the company said it anticipates "that we will see attacks targeting U.S. election systems, political campaigns, or NGOs that work closely with campaigns."
Microsoft is not the only tech giant trying to help with election security. The Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is working with an Oregon firm, Galois, on open-source voting software designed to be resistant to hacking. That system also uses encryption to allow voters to verify their votes.
But that system will not be ready for 2020. A recent report by Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center summed up the current state of vulnerability.
"A number of independent research efforts have demonstrated the ease with which individual electronic voting stations can be compromised by simply using the paltry resources available to university research teams," the report said. "Hostile foreign governments would be able to deploy orders of magnitude more resources to this task."
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/microsoft-will-give-away-software-guard-u-s-voting-machines-n1030956
Microsoft’s voting software is getting its first test in a small Wisconsin town
PUBLISHED TUE, FEB 18 20204:28 PM ESTUPDATED TUE, FEB 18 20208:04 PM EST
Jordan Novet
@JORDANNOVET
Microsoft has been working on software called ElectionGuard that will create a paper trail and assure voters their vote was properly tallied, the company said.
Tuesday’s Election Day in Fulton, Wisconsin, offers a chance for Microsoft to discover any problems and collect feedback.
Microsoft said it has been talking with all major companies that make voting devices.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/18/microsoft-electionguard-software-gets-first-test-in-fulton-wisconsin.html