New Election "Hacking" War Drums Are Getting Boring - Week 6 Blog Post

News outlets are once again calling for hacking of elections, this time the targeted elections are those of France. It is funny that most of the outlets reporting on this, like Politico are publishing with tiny letters as an "opinion" piece. Everything these days is an opinion piece in which everyone just throws mud and they hope it sticks.  From a cyber security perspective with the current system in the United States which was also allegedly "hacked" by the Russians according to the media, someone has to call BS on these stories. Many districts are paper based, voting machines are not connected to the internet or connected to each-other, and so on.

Now we go again with the same idiots who are calling for "everything is hacked" mentality. What media is mixing up is hacking and information warfare. Silly when you think about it since they have been waging a information warfare against their own citizens for some time now. I had the privilege of taking the information warfare class during the elections in the United States and you could not find better time to do it.  You can follow step by step instructions from the textbook and see them in the media propaganda machine. People have become so brainwashed and delusional that they believe whatever the media serves them up.  This goes for all parties involved, left and right. Media is nothing but a propaganda machine that serves the interest of their shareholders which are super rich, career politicians that give them access, and special interests that sponsor them and pay for their add's.

What upsets me the most is that uneducated people who don't understand how "hacking" or networking or anything else related to computing works, and run for their pitchforks the moment they hear it in the news. People have been discussing Hillary's e-mail for so long, but no-one mentioned that a 10 year old could have hacked it the way it was set up.  When you send thousands of e-mails a day its easy to compromise someone else inside your circle and get the server IP from an e-mail header. From there it just takes enumerating, testing for vulnerabilities and waiting. Or if you are lazy spear phishing e-mail from one of the inner circle people can do the job done. Voting machines however don't send out e-mails to their friends, don't connect to the internet, don't download torrents, and don't click on phishing e-mails.

Don't fall for the media war drums which if left unchecked could drives us into a World War III. Sensationalism sells and if there was no bickering between political parties who would ever read their "opinions" and "editorials".  Real journalism has died with the invention of the internet and the speed with which consumers expect to consume new information. If you want to remember what journalism looks like read something like National Geographic article where they spend months and years researching a specific topic.

Good night. :)