1. Why the Midterm Elections Are Hackable by Nick Holland

We're just shy of eight weeks from the midterms election and seemingly little has been done to assuage voters that their votes won't be compromised by a foreign third party. BankInfoSecurity, a division of the ISMG network, talked to Barbara Simons, a voting security expert who previously released a book on the subject, Broken Ballots. According to Simons, who has been keeping up with the lack of movement around both voting security technology and legislation of late, one of the biggest problems is that so few states allow its citizens to vote on completely paperless machines. "I'm pretty horrified by the fact that there are still 13 states in the United States today in which voters will be casting their ballots in this upcoming midterm election on paperless, unrecountable, vulnerable voting computers,” Simons told the publication, “Everybody in Georgia who casts a ballot in the polling place will be voting on these paperless machines that we have known how to hack since 2006 and that we also know can be hacked remotely."

Read more

2. Midland servers hacked, attackers demanding ransom by Andrew Mendler

That lull between the end of August, Labor Day, and the first week of September, naturally, is a prime time for cyber attacks. Admins are at the beach, on vacation, or at the very least away from their networks. Midland, a town located on Georgian Bay in Simcoe County, Ontario, found this out the hard way over the weekend after its systems were hit by ransomware. It sounds as if the town emerged somewhat unscathed from the incident. According to Andrew Mendler, a reporter for The Midland Mirror, Midland is taking steps to restore access and has contacted the appropriate authorities, including the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.

Read more

3. What Is the Price of Privacy? by Noelle Knell

Okay, so you're not going to get a literal answer to the question posed by this Government Technology headline but the article does do a nice job recapping some of the major privacy legislation to wend its way through the books, both here and abroad, so far in 2018. Noelle Knell, the publication's editor discusses the impact of GDPR and surely to be more impactful here, the California privacy bill that was passed in June. The piece ends with a call to action of sorts that suggests data privacy won't go away until it takes center stage: Government, and those who contract with government, must be held to a higher standard when it comes to privacy.

Read more