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Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.
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Dan Wallach, a professor in Rice University's Department of Computer Science who has studied electronic voting systems, agreed. “If we take it for what it says, it both focuses our attention on misinformation and ‘pre-bunks’ more sophisticated hacking operations. And, just to be clear, that doesn't mean we can relax about these sorts of sophisticated attacks. Election officials are, to some degree, working on improving their cyber defenses,” he told Motherboard in an email. “Unfortunately, it's much easier to convince people of a tampered election than to actually do the tampering.”The fact that election hacks have been rare and ineffective, and that they are unlikely, doesn’t mean that federal and state government agencies aren’t ready for any eventuality. “We are very, very intensely focused on election security,” Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said earlier this week. Motherboard has previously reported on potential critical vulnerabilities in voting machines, but there’s no evidence that voting machines have been breached during an actual election.Sign up for Motherboard’s daily newsletter for a regular dose of our original reporting, plus behind-the-scenes content about our biggest stories.
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