Welcome! Security Concerns on Voting Technology plus more on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson on WGAN
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Release Date: 09/26/2020
ShinyHunters Got FBI Records. Craig’s Question Is Which Contractor Was Holding Them.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
A listener asked Matt to ask Craig about the theft of FBI data, and Craig started with who holds it. Much of what the federal government keeps — background-check records, applications to the FBI, even the designs of weapons made by defense contractors — sits with third parties. The group behind this one is called ShinyHunters; its reported leader was arrested by Dutch police the day before the show. Craig’s point was the gap between the government and its vendors: last week every federal agency was required to patch ScreenConnect, a remote-support tool with a serious vulnerability....
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Office 2021 Stops Getting Security Updates on October 13. Windows Update Won’t Tell You What Else Has.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
On October 13, Microsoft ends support for Office 2021 — Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint stop receiving security patches that day — along with the extended security updates for Windows Server 2012. Danny, sitting in for Jim Polito, asked the obvious follow-up: how does anyone find out what they are running? Craig’s answer started with what people assume covers them. “Most people think, oh, I’ve got antivirus software. I’ve got Windows Update turned on. So, I’m all set. It is not true.” Windows Update does not update all the software on a Windows machine, and antivirus only...
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Senator Warner Wants an AI Oversight Agency. Craig Answers With the Clipper Chip.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Sen. Mark Warner went to the Senate floor to call for a government body to oversee AI. Craig read the legislation and the senator’s website before the show, and his objection was that the problem it describes is already illegal. Laws against hacking a computer system have been on the books for almost 30 years; people have gone to jail under them, foreign nationals included. “I think what they’re trying to do is get legislation that protects them from the laws that exist.” Jeff played the other side: if the AI gets loose because of “grossly incompetent nitwits that I chose to...
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Craig Puts It at 60%: The Share of New Web Content Written by AI
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
OpenAI launched ChatGPT 6, Sol, and Luna this month, claiming Sol makes about half as many mistakes as the models before it. Matt asked whether that is real progress. Craig’s answer was yes, with a catch: the models are not getting smarter. The companies, Anthropic included, have rewritten the code around them so the AI runs the same prompt again and again from different angles and then votes on the most likely answer. The new models use about twice the tokens of the old ones. “And they get a 50% better answer.” Matt: “There seems to be a correlation here.” The second half was about...
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Websites Collected Driver’s License Photos to Check Ages. Craig Says 150 Million Were Stolen.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Jim came into the segment from a morning on Flock license-plate cameras, and Craig took it one step wider. The technology is old and the courts have ruled on it for years; his discomfort is with how much of our information is collected at all. Websites that must verify your age now ask for a photo of your driver’s license or passport, so Facebook “or whomever” holds government ID for millions of people. Craig said 150 million of those records have been stolen. “So now what are they going to do? How am I going to prove who I am when other people have a copy of all of my information?”...
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The AI “Breakouts” Were Given Hacking Instructions and an Internet Connection
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
OpenAI’s model got into Hugging Face. Anthropic said its model had broken into someone first. Then Google said its model had done it before either of them. Jeff wanted to know how these AIs keep “breaking out,” and whether he should picture Robby the Robot fiddling with a lock. Craig spent the previous two weeks reading the published investigations, which go back to May, and said nothing broke out of anything: “These AIs were let loose on networks that had access to the Internet. They were given specific instructions that had 100% to do with hacking and breaking into systems.” The...
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Jeff and Heidi Want a Robot Bartender for Their Home Bar. Craig Says It Runs About $400.
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Jeff and Heidi hold happy hour at the bar in their house at 6:03, and Heidi has decided what it is missing: a robot bartender. Jeff’s terms were that he picks how it looks and she picks what it says. Craig’s answer was that the hardware already exists. Bars now have table-top machines that check your ID card and make any drink you order; those start around $30,000, and home versions run about $400. The conversation half is ChatGPT or Claude, spoken rather than typed. It started with a more serious question. Elon Musk and Sam Altman both say AI development should slow down, so why not...
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Chinese Ships Are Stopping in Canada’s Northern Straits to Map the Sea Floor
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Craig’s wife sent him an article the morning of the show: Chinese ships moving through the straits of northern Canada are not just passing through. International agreements allow transit through territorial waters at a reasonable pace, but these ships are stopping, and it looks like they are measuring the sea floor. Russia is doing it too. The route used to be frozen; now it can be navigated in summer. Craig used it to explain why the U.S. wants a foothold in the North. It was the last stop in a long Canada conversation. Jim opened on British Columbia’s three-year experiment...
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Microsoft Shipped Almost 700 Patches in One Patch Tuesday — Six Times a Normal Month
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
This was the biggest Patch Tuesday on record: Microsoft pushed close to 700 patches in a single month, roughly six times the usual volume. Craig's follow-up question is the one that actually decides whether a machine is exposed. Microsoft is patching Microsoft. Who is patching everything else? Windows Update never touches third-party software — it barely updates Windows itself, Craig said, and it does nothing for the average of 62 other programs sitting on a typical computer, many of which are being actively exploited right now. He named Adobe Reader and WinZip specifically: the current...
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Craig Left Quebec in the 1970s, When a Driver's License Ran $300 and Registering the Family Wagon Ran $3,000
Craig Peterson - Secure Your Business, Your Privacy, and Save Your Sanity
Craig grew up in Canada and left in the 1970s, and this week he put numbers on why. A driver's license in Quebec cost $300 a year. Registration on the family station wagon cost $3,000 a year. Both figures in 1970s dollars. Auto insurance, by contrast, was free — which Craig turned into the sharpest point of the segment: his father remarried, his stepmother got her license at 26, and she totaled three cars. Craig's question was not about her driving. It was about what happens to the premium. "How much does insurance go up? How much is the risk? Zero, of course, because there is no insurance....
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Craig discusses problems related to Mail-in Voting and Voting technology.
For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
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Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:
Craig Peterson: [00:00:00] Red team-blue team. This is a very interesting problem that is now being confirmed. Through a study. A bipartisan study. We are in trouble with our election this year.
Hey everybody. Craig Peterson here. Thanks for joining us.
Man alive! can anything be more political than a presidential election cycle? It is as. Downloading what has been happening when what's being said right now. There are a number of studies that have looked into the efficacy, the ability to have a fair election where we really know the results. There've been all kinds of suggestions.
We've talked on the show before. About well, we could have, an app that we use to vote. We saw what happened with the Democrat primary in Iowa, right? Total mess. We saw what happened with this app called Vote. I don't know if you heard about this, but this is another voting company. There were some security assessments done and votes criticize the researchers and their methods.
The security issues that were uncovered with the votes application, we've actually confirmed a security company called Trail of Bits in March this year. Some serious problems. At the USENIX security conference that just occurred here, about a week ago. Okay. They had a panel of voting experts and they got together and they talked about election security.
They in fact had a couple of sessions at the Usenix security conference that was covering the voting systems and technology. We've talked before about the black hat. Conference and how they set up these voting machines and just see if they could be he hacked. There was like a 12-year old hacked a voting machine that just so simple for so many of these machines out there.
The biggest problem with the voting machines is you don't have a physical audit trail in many cases. What did they do? They added some audit trails to some of them. They have a thermal printer. have you ever taken the receipt from the grocery store, stuck it in your pocket, and left it there for a couple of weeks and it becomes illegible or heaven forbid, it gets too warm? Maybe it is stuck in a hot room or a storage room or a car. It turns completely black.
What good is that sort of thing going to do? All you have is a whole bunch of lines, one at a time about what the votes were. Very hard to tabulate. It's not like the cards that you can use to vote on which many States in new England Jews and frankly, our country right wide right now.
But those cards. You can sit there and analyze them. You might've seen a video of what happened in the Florida election and holding these punch cards up to try and figure out. Is this a hanging Chad and pregnant? Chad was a punched. Was it not Punched? Was this intentional? Did they mean to do that instead?
All of this craziness with the cards. Let's say the question is about the president and who was voted for, was it Joe Biden or was it, Donald Trump, and all they have to do is look at the card. Okay. there's partisan left, a partisan right, maybe a neutral observer standing there. They say this is clearly Joe Biden. So they put it in the Joe Biden pile next. Who is this? that's clearly President Trump, so we'll put it in the Donald Trump pile. Then when you're done, you just count them in the pile versus these audit trails. Yeah. They're audit trails. But how do you do that when it's a paper tape?
How do you do that? If it's been written into a database? How do you know that database wasn't altered? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. there's, there are ways to track things in databases and databases having different types of integrity protection, but overall, you can't really trust it.
And these researchers reverse-engineered this votes Android application, and they did a static analysis on this back end server software that was actually tallying the vote and without having access to the source code without having them a massive number of people who are trying to analyze the system as Russia does.
Russia has its hands on some of our voting equipment. It's easy enough to buy online and pretends you're someone you aren't. So they were doing this blind, the security researchers, and they found five high severity vulnerabilities and a serious privacy issue.
That's using one of these apps from a company that does voting. And we've talked about some of the different voting systems out there from Diebold and many others that have various types of problems. Really. The only way to know if a vote is valid. Is to have a, I like the card ID where you fill in the little circle and then that gets run through a voting machine and it's all overseen by, hopefully, independent people, but I don't care if they're partisan one way or the other and that machine tallies it and keeps the card.
So you can now go back and do a spot analysis on it, or you can do deep analysis on it. I think all of that sort of thing makes sense.
But that's not what we're talking about this year. We're talking about having a presidential election where people are mailing in ballots. It just blows my mind. People comparing it somehow to absentee ballots and absentee voting.
It is not the same thing. And here's why. If you want an absentee ballot, you go to the town clerk or the election official. And you swear out in front of them that you need an absentee ballot. Now in most places that have now been removed that requirement to say, yeah, I'm going to be out of town out of the country. Eh, whatever the reason is, I'm not going to be able to vote on that day to this year. I think it's November 3rd and therefore needed an absentee ballot. Okay. So that's step one. And that's been removed in almost all cases.
I don't have a particular problem with that. Although I would much rather see someone showing up to vote on voting day, which by the way is required by the constitution. I have no idea how this early voting stuff has happened, how it could possibly be constitutional. The vote is November 3rd. It doesn't start on September 1st. It's November 3rd, and that allows the campaigns to get their messaging straight.
It allows the little guys to actually compete with these people who are already serving in office. Anyhow, that's a separate issue.
You have now been standing in front of that clerk's office. And that clerk now brings out the paperwork. what ballot do you want? You might have a partisan ballot, but for the general election, you don't, you have all of the final candidates and now they verify you are who you say you are.
In most cases, that means you present a valid ID. They check the voter rolls and make sure you are eligible to vote and once that's all taken care of, they will hand you the paperwork. Then you can go home. You can vote on that. You sealed it in an envelope, you sign the outside of the envelope across the seal. You follow the instructions. They are not that complicated. And you either drop that back at the clerk's office, which is the safest way to do it, or you mail it and it goes to the clerk's office and it has to be there before the election. And there's some argument that it just has to be stamped by the post office before the end of November 3rd. That's the absentee voting process.
What's happening in many States is they're saying, Oh, all you have to do now is look in your mailbox because we're sending ballots to everybody that we have a name and address for and then you just fill it out. You send it in. TaDa all done. No verification of who you are.
In some cases like the way Florida has been doing that, there is a verification that they did receive your ballot, but that's kind of it.
And there are more problems. And these are what I'm going to talk about when we get back, what are the real problems? The deep problems when we're talking about these ballots.
We'll get into that. Here are the problems that hackers could use. Very inexpensively, very easy for us to have zero confidence that the vote tally is right.
So stick around. I'll be right back. You listening to Craig Peterson right here on the radio, on podcasts, and [email protected].
Stick around.
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