DEFCON

Episode 100: Estonia’s Former CIO talks about engineering a secure electronic vote

In this week’s episode of The Security Ledger Podcast (#100 – woot!): Taavi Kotka spent 4 years as the Chief Information officer for the nation of Estonia – whose government is widely recognized as among the most technologically advanced in the world. He talks about the Estonian model for e-governance and how the U.S. has ruined the term “e-voting” for everyone. Also: what happens when discussions about the security of bits and bytes have consequences measured in flesh and blood? Joshua Corman, the Chief Security Officer at the firm PTC joins us to talk about it, ahead of his featured presentation at next week’s Security of Things Forum in Boston.

Podcast: Infosec has a #MeToo Problem also TOR-ifying Wikipedia

In this week’s Security Ledger Podcast, we talk with Genevieve Southwick, CEO of the B-Sides Las Vegas hacker conference about the information security industry’s #metoo problem and what steps conference organizers are taking to stem sexual assault and harassment at information security events. Also: researcher Alec Muffet talks with us about making a TOR version of Wikipedia (and why it’s not sticking around). Finally, Martin McKeay of Akamai talks about the state of Internet security one year after Mirai. (Spoiler alert: Mirai is still a problem.)

Our Analog Future: Election Hacking puts Paper Ballots back in Vogue

Virginia is reverting from electronic to paper ballots while Rhode Island’s legislature this week passed a law to mandate audits comparing paper and electronic voting records.

It’s the Corruption, Stupid: why Russians aren’t the biggest threat to Election Security

In-brief: Russian hackers aren’t the biggest threat to the security and integrity of elections says Bev Harris of Black Box Voting. Instead, it’s a more common enemy: run of the mill political corruption, mostly at the local level. Also: Eric Hodge of CyberScout talks about the challenges of helping states secure their election systems. Problem number one: recalcitrant voting machine makers. 

Hero WannaCry Researcher Charged over Links to Kronos Trojan

In-brief: A British researcher who became a hero after he stopped the WannaCry ransomware from spreading globally has been apprehended in Nevada and charged with distributing the Kronos banking trojan in the U.S. between July 2014 and July 2015.