Tag Archives: voting security

Weekly output: network security (x2), election security, Google finding Apple’s bugs

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Now it can be told: I spent all of the last two weeks on the West Coast, with my stay in Las Vegas for Black Hat and DEF CON sandwiched inside time with my in-laws in California. That let me have a much shorter trip to and from Vegas and then segue from WiFi security to a little wine tasting and, more important, a lot of napping.

8/12/2019: WiFi can be a free-for-all for hackers. Here’s how to stop them from taking your data, USA Today

I e-mailed this to my editor with the following note: “I’m sending this over the DEF CON conference WiFi, so if you only see pirate-flag emoji I trust you’ll call or text to warn me.” If you don’t want to read all 600-ish words in this piece, the top three are “encryption is your friend.”

8/12/2019: This tech could secure voting machines, but not before 2020, Yahoo Finance

One of the big reasons I decided to stick around Vegas for DEF CON–even though it meant I’d have to pay $300 in cash for that conference badge–was the chance to see the exhibits and presentations at its Voting Village. The proceedings did not disappoint, even if a DARPA demo from a project with the delightful acronym of SSITH is far from yielding shipping voting hardware.

8/12/2019: Google got Apple to fix 10 security flaws in the iPhone, Yahoo Finance

Black Hat offered a two-course serving of Apple-security news. Its first day featured a briefing from Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich about how her team uncovered 10 serious iOS vulnerabilities, and then its second day brought a talk from Apple security-engineering head Ivan Krstić that ended with news of a much more open bug-bounty program.

8/14/2019: This Morning with Gordon Deal August 13, 2019, This Morning with Gordon Deal

I talked about my USAT column on this business-news radio program; my spot starts just after the 13th minute.

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Weekly output: John Brennan on election security, Saudi Arabia’s Twitter operations (x3)

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For most of this past week, the conference badge was on the other lanyard: My wife was out of town for work.That brief spell of solo parenting ended with the house miraculously not much messier than before and me needing a nap more than usual.

10/17/2018: Ex-CIA chief’s take on election security: Don’t panic, do stay paranoid, Yahoo Finance

When I filed a first draft of my interview with former CIA director John Brennan two weeks ago, my editor said it read more like two posts and asked if I wouldn’t mind turning it into a pair of stories. This covers the second half of our conversation, folding in some quotes from some subsequent election-security events around D.C.

10/20/2018: Saudi Arabia’s Twitter mole, Al Jazeera

The New York Times reported Saturday that Saudi Arabia’s attempts to suppress dissidents like murdered Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi extended to recruiting a Twitter insider. Several hours later, I told viewers–as overdubbed into Arabic–that this development represented a serious departure from Silicon Valley’s traditional definition of espionage as “an employee takes trade secrets to a competitor.”

10/21/2018: Saudi Twitter operations Al Jazeera

As part of what looks like the same kind of flood-the-zone coverage strategy I usually associate with Apple events, AJ had me on two more times Sunday to talk about this Twitter mole and Riyadh’s other attempts to change the social-media conversation.