National Guard Called In To Thwart Cyberattack in Louisiana Weeks Before Election (reuters.com) 31
The Louisiana National Guard was called in to stop a series of cyberattacks aimed at small government offices across the state in recent weeks, Reuters reported Friday, citing two people with knowledge of the events, highlighting the cyber threat facing local governments in the run up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election. From the report: The situation in Louisiana follows a similar case in Washington state, according to a cybersecurity consultant familiar with the matter, where hackers infected some government offices with a type of malware known for deploying ransomware, which locks up systems and demands payment to regain access. Senior U.S. security officials have warned here since at least 2019 that ransomware poses a risk to the U.S. election, namely that an attack against certain state government offices around the election could disrupt systems needed to administer aspects of the vote. It is unclear if the hackers sought to target systems tied to the election in Louisiana or were simply hoping for a payday. Yet the attacks raised alarms because of the potential harm it could have led to and due to evidence suggesting a sophisticated hacking group was involved. Experts investigating the Louisiana incidents found a tool used by the hackers that was previously linked to a group associated with the North Korean government, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
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Politician: You see those ethernet cables?
Soldier: Yes, sir!
Politician: Stop all the evil bits from traveling through those cables!
Soldier: Sir! Yes, sir!
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This was my second thought, after imaging soldiers being beamed into the affected computers as TRON characters.
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well that sounds like some jay can do to bad he failed the PT TEST and we had to let him go Really good tech Now why is that part of army we have lots people who really want to do this but when we say they have to basic they drop out or some don't even pass the fitness test to get in.
How is the National Guard going to help? (Score:1)
Guardians of a series of tubes. Shoot da haxx0rs! (Score:1)
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Pssst, the article is referring to the LA National Guard's Cyber Defense Incident Response Team. Who does your local government call when their IT infrastructure is attacked? Anyone?
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Who ya gonna call?
LAN Guard Cyber DIRT !
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Pure clickbait (Score:2)
Far down in the linked article is a short paragraph pointing out that Louisiana's election infrastructure is totally self-contained to the Secretary of State's network. No local government network touches a local Registrar of Voters office network or the Sec of State in any way.
Once again some local parish employee simply clicked on something in an email they shouldn't have and got their PC encrypted.
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Plus, while don't know how the local/state races are going, it's not like we don't already know how Louisiana is going to fall in the federal races. So just add this one to the pile of stories about under-trained employees in government offcies getting phished.
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Early voting is off the charts. Never seen anything like it.
Re:Backwater cyber what now? (Score:5, Informative)
The Louisiana National Guard has a dedicated Cyber Defense Incident Response Team. This is who was called. But hey, don't let that interrupt your bigotry.
https://geauxguard.la.gov/tag/... [la.gov]
https://www.army.mil/article/1... [army.mil]
https://www.defense.gov/observ... [defense.gov]
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> ...bigotry...
Too much to unpack here so let me bullet it
- CERT reports on threats
- Various organizations fight threats
- Nobody in the industry calls it "cyber", only rubes outside the industry. This may be the "bigotry" you refer to... where I think anyone who says cyber this and cyber that is a cyber idiot.
- Louisianna is a beautiful state, and while on that topic New Orleans is a beautiful place just before Mardi Gras. Don't be there during a flood.
- The same people who can't stop running water can
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- Nobody in the industry calls it "cyber", only rubes outside the industry. This may be the "bigotry" you refer to... where I think anyone who says cyber this and cyber that is a cyber idiot.
USCYBERCOM says hi.
Oh, you think the NSA's group that also happens to be the largest single cyber warfare group in the US (thousands of workers plus a $700 Million budget) is a bunch of "cyber idiots"? Does that include the other couple of tens of thousands of cyber workers and their $10 billion budget, too? Yeah, good luck with that one, buddy.
The US government finds "CYBER" to be a useful term, because all the other terms people use to describe things like this don't work for them. Perhaps you should s
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I sure it was just a team of system administrators and PC technicians who help the local governments recover from a ransomware attack.
I have lived in rural communities, getting IT resources to handle a malware recovery could be problematic and expensive. Borrowing resources from the National Guard doesn't sound out of line.
Disclaimer
I work as a contracted system administrator for the Air Force Reserve
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"The team was created to respond to cyber events within Louisiana by securing and restoring affected networks and defeating threats. It is made up of soldiers and airmen who have technology backgrounds in both their civilian and military careers. "
Ignorance in government (Score:2)
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> Most people are almost completely ignorant ... and don't want to educate themselves, in my experience.
Are you thinking of Slashdotters, or people in general? :)
Your comment applies to both, in my experience.
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and vendors with best kickbacks get the contract.
Photographic Evidence (Score:2)
None of this is possible if... (Score:3)
each voter shows a photo ID and submits a paper ballot on a singular election day, or with a valid excuse does so in advance at the registrar.
Stretching an election over multiple days opens windows for fraud and multiple voting.
Going electronic opens windows for hacking & fraud & data loss.
Not verifying voter identities, particularly when paired with multi-day voting, opens huge windows for fraud.
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Voter ID protects against one thing: in-person voter fraud. Something which happens vanishingly seldom.
Voting by mail provides good authentication (Score:1)
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These are all valid potential factors, but given that half of the voters (who actually vote, not just eligible voters) already votes early (see the numbers for 2016 elections) apparently it is not a big deal for election officials.
I was astonished when I learned that just recently while some news outlet reported current preliminary numbers that seemed huge, but apparently far behind this number right now (we still have time - 10 days until election, but it is entirely possible that the ultimate result, albe
Why fix problems when you can warn about them? (Score:1)
I know election security is left up to the states, but this sentence is like a summary of security in the US. everybody issues warnings but no one does anything. Medicine warns that pandemics are a danger, but no one listens, and aren't the medical people the ones who should have been preparing? Government warns companies of the dangers of ransomware, but business chooses to ignore