Tag Archives: computer hacking

Let’s Find Out What Happened

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On Monday, Just the News posted an article about the hacking into the Alaskan voter registration system by a group of Iranian nationals.

The article reports:

During the 2020 election, Iranian nationals demonstrated vulnerabilities in states’ voter registration systems by hacking Alaska’s. Those vulnerabilities, particularly regarding overseas voters and their ballots, must be investigated by the Department of Justice and fixed across the U.S., election integrity groups warn.

While Alaska admitted to its voter registration system being breached in 2020, the federal government said it was aware of “at least one state” that had been hacked by Iranians. The DOJ later said that “approximately eleven state voter websites” were attacked at the time.

In the Election Research Institute’s (ERI) new report titled, “Failure of the Weaponized Department of Justice to Protect the US Election System,” it shows how there was a significant increase in the number of overseas ballot applications and ballots submitted in 2020 as Iranian hackers revealed how they could use the data from Alaska’s breached voter registration system to complete such applications and ballots.

The article concludes:

It is yet another intrusion into that election by one of America’s foreign adversaries, this time the Iranian Republican Guard Corp. Not only did the FBI originally deny that a cyber-attack had occurred but they dismissed the incident as propaganda and they failed to investigate the very real vulnerabilities exposed,” Mitchell (Election Integrity Network Founder Cleta Mitchell) said. “The indictment of the international bad actors responsible for this very serious breach into a state’s voter registration has done nothing to deter the Iranians.”

Mitchell added that she hopes “Sen. Grassley (R-IA) and the new leadership of the FBI will immediately add this episode to the growing list of 2020 election matters that demand investigation and accountability.”

“The FBI repeatedly ignored serious threats to our election system in 2020, leaving it significantly vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors, both foreign and domestic. We need to know why that happened and how to keep it from happening ever again.”

Mitchell also said that the UOCAVA (Uniformed Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act) “system is utterly broken, it fails to serve our active duty military members, and it is clearly vulnerable to exploitation by our adversaries. Congress and the Administration must fix the problems within UOCAVA to make certain that those who wish to commit fraud in our elections are not able to use the UOCAVA system for that purpose. This report raises serious alarms that must be addressed before the 2026 election.”

The FBI didn’t respond to a request for comment by publishing time.

If we don’t protect our elections, we won’t have a free country.

The Techie Take On The Clinton Email Server

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James Rosen posted an article at Fox News yesterday about some technical people who decided to investigate some of Hillary Clinton’s claims about her private, secure email server.

Some findings from the article:

Now, working with publicly available tools that map network connectivity, experts have established that the last “hop” before the mail server’s Internet Protocol, or IP, address (listed as 64.94.172.146) is Internap’s aggregator in Manhattan (listed as 216.52.95.10). 

 “This is a very strong indication that the clintonemail.com server is in Manhattan,” the source told Fox News.  

 Obviously the server is not in Chappaqua being guarded by the Secret Service–most likely it is in President Clinton’s Manhattan office. Not that physically guarding a server is worth anything anyway unless someone is going to steal the server itself.

The ‘good hackers’ also discovered:

  Perhaps most concerning, private analysts determined that clintonemail.com has been running an older model of Microsoft Internet Information Services, or IIS – specifically version 7.5, which has been documented to leave users exposed on multiple fronts. The website CVEDetails.com, which bills itself as “the ultimate security vulnerability datasource,” is awash with descriptions of serious security vulnerabilities associated with version 7.5, including “memory corruption,” “password disclosure vulnerability,” and the enabling of “remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service.”  

The cyberlab technician who discovered the Clintons’ use of version 7.5 marveled at “the vulnerabilities the Clintons are ignoring” in an email to Fox News. “This is a big deal and just the thing real-world hackers look for in a target and will exploit to the max,” the source said.  

“Several of these vulnerabilities have been known since 2010 and yet HRC is running official State comms through it.”  

The article concludes:

Just the original decision to use a private email account, with Clinton’s own surname embedded in it, has baffled the hacker community. The analyst with experience in the intelligence community, a “white hat” hacker — the kind corporate firms retain to conduct “penetration testing” that exposes businesses’ cybersecurity lapses — told Fox News: “If we learned that the foreign minister of a major foreign country was using her own private server to send and receive emails, and was relying on outdated commercial software to operate and protect it, that’d be a hallelujah moment for us.”

As you read this article, please understand a few things. It sounds as if the people who set up the server for the Clintons lacked some of the knowledge they needed to make the server totally secure. Making a server totally secure is nearly impossible and you need really good technical people to do it. If the server was hacked during Mrs. Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, there is no reason to believe that the Clintons or anyone else would know about it. That is a serious problem. The other thing I would appreciate anyone reading this article to be aware of is that I have very little knowledge of how this all works. I have a husband and a daughter that hopefully keep me (and my computer) out of trouble. I do know, however, from being around serious techies that computer security is an issue, particularly in our government. Foreign countries that do not love America are constantly attempting to hack into military, commercial, and government computers. The last thing we need to do is to make it easy for them.