Security News for the Week Ending October 30, 2020

Louisiana National Guard Called in to Help Local Election Officials

According to tips, the state of Louisiana had to call out the National Guard after some number of small government offices across the state were hit by ransomware. Experts say the tools have the hallmarks of the North Koreans, so all of the major attackers – Russia, China, Iran and now North Korea – are all trying to compromise our elections. This problem is not going away. Credit: Business Insider

Attacks on Cryptocurrency Continue

A hacker stole $24 million of cryptocurrency service Harvest Finance, a company that allows users to arbitrage cryptocurrencies. The company was hit by a $570 million “bank run” after the attack. They claim they know who the attacker is. One more time, software has bugs and can be exploited. Who would have thunk? Credit: Coindesk

Ransomware Disables GA. County Election Database

This is both good news and bad news. Hall County, GA was hit by a ransomware attack earlier this month. The attack, disabled the voter database, along with other systems like phones. The county claims that they will still be able to run the election because they can manually verify signatures from voter registration cards. They are also using a state database that was not affected. This points out that attacking some small county in a state is probably not the best way to change the outcome of an election. Credit: Gainesville Times

Trump Website Briefly Defaced

One of the campaign’s websites was briefly defaced Tuesday night and the site was replaced by a message similar in style to the messages put on a website that the government seizes. The message looked like this:

Of course the site had not been seized and it was returned to its normal state after a little while. To be honest, I am surprised not more has occurred given the other events going on in the country. This seems pretty childish, but we don’t know if the warning on the site is true; stay tuned.

Regarding the hack, CISA Director Chris Krebs said on Twitter, “Like I said yesterday, website defacements are noise. Don’t fall for these attempts designed to distract, sensationalize, and confuse. Ultimately they’re trying to undermine your confidence in our voting process.” Credit: Variety

Wisconsin Repubs Say Hackers Duped Them Out of $2 Million+

The Wisconsin Republican Party says that hackers scammed them out of more than $2 million of donors’ money using very traditional business email compromise attacks creating fake invoices from real vendors and paid to the hackers’ bank accounts. The Wisconsin Dems say that they have been targeted by over 800 attacks, but so far, none (that they know of) have been successful. Credit: AP

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