Presidential election | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In a historic decision, Romania's constitutional court has annulled the result of the first round of voting in the presidential election amid allegations of Russian interference. As a result, the second round vote, which was scheduled for December 8, 2024, will no longer take place. Călin Georgescu, who won the first round, denounced the verdict as an "officialized coup" and an attack on democracy. "The electoral process for the election of the President of Romania will be resumed in its entirety, with the Government to establish a new date for the election of the President of Romania, as well as a new calendar program for the implementation of the necessary actions," the Constitutional Court of Romania said . The judiciary body said the decision is pursuant to Article 146(f) of the Constitution, emphasizing the need to ensure the fairness and legality of the electoral process. The decision is final and binding. The development comes days after declassif...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the seizure of 32 internet domains used by a pro-Russian propaganda operation called Doppelganger as part of a sweeping set of actions. Accusing the Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaign of violating U.S. money laundering and criminal trademark laws, the agency called out companies Social Design Agency (SDA), Structura National Technology (Structura), and ANO Dialog for working at the behest of the Russian Presidential Administration. The goal, it said , is to "covertly spread Russian government propaganda with the aim of reducing international support for Ukraine, bolstering pro-Russian policies and interests, and influencing voters in U.S. and foreign elections, including the U.S. 2024 Presidential Election." Among the methods Doppelganger used to drive viewership to the cybersquatted media domains encompassed the deployment of "influencers" worldwide, paid social media ads, a...

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Fair elections are the lifelines of democracy, but in recent years election hacking has become a hot topic worldwide. Whether it's American voting machines during the 2016 presidential election or India's EVMs during 2014 general elections, the integrity, transparency, and security of electronic voting machines remained questionable, leaving a wound in the minds of many that is difficult to heal. Many countries, including the largest democracy in the world i.e., India, believe the best way to ensure the security of EVMs is to make its technology opaque to bad actors, but in recent years a large section of the population is losing trust in any system that has been certified by a closed group of experts only. To make a balance between transparency and security, in May 2019, Microsoft released a free, open-source software development kit (SDK) called ElectionGuard that aims to enable end-to-end verification of voting. Microsoft's ElectionGuard SDK can be integra...

A former NSA contractor, who pleaded guilty to leaking a classified report on Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. presidential election to an online news outlet last year, has been sentenced to five years and three months in prison. Reality Winner , a 26-year-old Georgia woman who held a top-secret security clearance and worked as a government contractor in Georgia with Pluribus International, initially faced 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. However, in the U.S. District Court in Augusta, Georgia on Thursday, Winner agreed to a plea agreement that called for five years and three months in prison with three years of supervision after release. Back in May 2017, Winner printed out a top-secret document detailing about the Russian hacking into U.S. voting systems, smuggled the report out of the agency in her underwear, and then mailed it anonymously to The Intercept. The Intercept, an online publication that has been publishing classified NSA documents leaked by Edward Snow...

Update (Tuesday, April 11):  The arrest of a Russian man in Spain was apparently for his role in Kelihos botnet responsible for sending hundreds of millions of spam emails worldwide. A Russian computer hacker and alleged spam kingpin was arrested in Barcelona, Spain, on Friday reportedly over suspicion of being involved in hacking attacks linked to alleged interference in last year's United States presidential election process . 36-year-old Peter Yuryevich Levashov  from St. Petersburg was detained by police in Barcelona after US authorities issued an international arrest warrant for his arrest. While the Russian embassy in Madrid announced Levashov's arrest on Sunday, it did not confirm the reason for his arrest. This is the second arrest made by the Spanish authorities since the US 2016 election. In January, the police detained Stanislav Lisov , 32, on suspicion of creating and operating the NeverQuest Banking Trojan and possibly influencing the presidential ele...

In his final month in office, President Barack Obama has ordered U.S. intelligence agencies to conduct a "full review" of pre-election cyber attacks against Democratic Party organizations that many believe affected the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The United States intelligence agencies have attributed those series of cyber-attacks to Russia that shook the US election season. "The President earlier this week instructed the intelligence community to conduct a full review of the pattern of malicious cyber activity related to our presidential election cycle," White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters. At an event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, White House's counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco announced that the president had "directed the Intelligence Community to conduct a full review of what happened during the 2016 election process." President is expecting a full report before the end of his term, and Pres...

With just two days before the presidential election, WikiLeaks late Sunday night published a new trove of emails apparently hacked from the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The most recent dump of more than 8,000 emails came after the whistleblowing site, on a daily basis over last four weeks, has already leaked over 50,000 emails stolen from the key figure in the DNC – Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. However, this time, not everything went as planned by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks early Monday morning announced on Twitter that shortly after the release of hacked DNC emails the organization was the target of a major Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. What's more?  Soon after WikiLeaks reported the DDoS attack on its email publication servers, Twitter also went down, and the outage lasts for at least 30 minutes. According to a status monitor, the Twitter outage began at around 6.45am GMT and continued for nearly half an hour, though report...

Wikileaks completed its 10 years today, and within this timespan, the whistleblower site has published over 10 million documents, and there's more to come. In the name of celebration of its 10th Anniversary, Wikileaks promises to leak documents pertaining to Google, United States presidential election and more over the next ten weeks. Speaking by video link to an anniversary news conference at the Volksbuhne Theater in Berlin on Tuesday morning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange eagerly announced his plans to release a series of publications every week for the next 10 weeks. The upcoming leaks will include "significant material" related to Google, the US presidential election, military operations, arms trading and, the hot topic of past few years, mass surveillance. Assange also promised to publish all documents related to the US presidential race before the election day on November 8. "There is an enormous expectation in the United States," Assange said f...

A group of unknown hackers or an individual hacker may have breached voter registration databases for election systems in at least two US states, according to the FBI, who found evidence during an investigation this month. Although any intrusion in the state voting system has not been reported, the FBI is currently investigating the cyberattacks on the official websites for voter registration system in both Illinois and Arizona, said Yahoo News . The FBI's Cyber Division released a " Flash Alert " to election offices and officials across the United States, asking them to watch out for any potential intrusions and take better security precautions. "In late June 2016, an unknown actor scanned a state's Board of Election website for vulnerabilities using Acunetix, and after identifying a Structured Query Language (SQL) injection (SQLi) vulnerability, used SQLmap to target the state website," the FBI alert reads. "The majority of the data exfiltr...

Paul F Renda  going to begin a series on hacking the politics in the united states and why India and china won the past Presidential election. This eclectic hacker look will use partial differential equations, game theory, the prisoner's dilemma, and fractals. I am going to show unequivalently that the true winner of the election is the expanding middle class in India and China. The losers are the middle class in the United States and, in particular, 19–34-year-old. Sometimes in history a confluence of unusual events occur every 100 years or 1,000 years; this is such a time. Dorothy, fasten your seatbelt. It is going to be a bumpy ride: You are not in Kansas anymore. In order for me to talk about politics and the election, I first have to introduce the Curley effect. This concept was developed by using empirical data and partial differential equations. It is mathematically sound, and mathematics is the language of the universe. I have copied the abstract and secon...