SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
We had submissions by two Soylentils about the wiping of drives on a voting server in Georgia (USA).
Georgia Election Server Wiped after Lawsuit Filed
A computer server crucial to a lawsuit against Georgia election officials was quietly wiped clean by its custodians just after the suit was filed, The Associated Press has learned.
The server’s data was destroyed July 7 by technicians at the Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the state’s election system. The data wipe was revealed in an email — sent last week from an assistant state attorney general to plaintiffs in the case — that was obtained by the AP. More emails obtained in a public records request confirmed the wipe.
The lawsuit, filed by a diverse group of election reform advocates, aims to force Georgia to retire its antiquated and heavily criticized election technology. The server in question, which served as a statewide staging location for key election-related data, made national headlines in June after a security expert disclosed a gaping security hole that wasn’t fixed six months after he reported it to election authorities.
[...] It’s not clear who ordered the server’s data irretrievably erased.
The Kennesaw election center answers to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brian Kemp, a Republican who is running for governor in 2018 and is the main defendant in the suit. A spokeswoman for the secretary of state’s office said Wednesday that “we did not have anything to do with this decision,” adding that the office also had no advance warning of the move.
[...] Plaintiffs in the lawsuit, mostly Georgia voters, want to scrap the state's 15-year-old vote-management system — particularly its 27,000 AccuVote touchscreen voting machines, hackable devices that don't use paper ballots or keep hardcopy proof of voter intent. The plaintiffs were counting on an independent security review of the Kennesaw server, which held elections staging data for counties, to demonstrate the system's unreliability.
Wiping the server "forestalls any forensic investigation at all," said Richard DeMillo, a Georgia Tech computer scientist following the case. "People who have nothing to hide don't behave this way."
[...] It could still be possible to recover relevant information from the server.
The FBI is known to have made an exact data image of the server in March when it investigated the security hole. The Oct. 18 email disclosing the server wipe said the state attorney general's office was "reaching out to the FBI to determine whether they still have the image" and also disclosed that two backup servers were wiped clean Aug. 9, just as the lawsuit moved to federal court.
On Wednesday, the attorney general's office notified the court of its intent to subpoena the FBI seeking the image.
Atlanta FBI spokesman Stephen Emmett would not say if that image still exists. Nor would he say whether agents examined it to determine whether the server's files might have been altered by unauthorized users.
Georgia, USA, Election Server Wiped Just After Lawsuit Filed
The Center for Elections Systems at Kennesaw State University, which runs the US state of Georgia's election system wiped a server crucial to a lawsuit regarding the integrity of the most recent national election. The lawsuit was filed on July 3rd and 7th. Wiping the server has forestalled any potential foresnic investigations, and no one is saying yet who ordered the erasure. The lawsuit argued that the server had been quite insecure and probably compromised. However, without evidence to examine, this cannot be determined. This follows on the confirmation last year, prior to being blocked by the GOP, of the physical inability of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to audit the ballots.
Also at: C|net, The Register, Mercury News, and Ars Technica.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 28 2017, @07:58AM
Good to see Hillary's SysAdmin found new employment.