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posted by janrinok on Saturday September 21 2019, @06:07PM   Printer-friendly
from the too-little-too-late dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

Microsoft: Free Windows 7 security updates for 2020 election

Microsoft said Friday it will offer free security updates through the 2020 election in the United States—and in other interested democratic countries with national elections next year—for federally certified voting systems running on soon-to-be-outdated Windows 7 software.

An Associated Press analysis previously found that the vast majority of 10,000 election jurisdictions in the U.S. use Windows 7 or an older operating system to create ballots, program voting machines, tally votes and report counts.

Windows 7 reaches its "end of life" on Jan. 14, meaning Microsoft stops providing free technical support and producing "patches" to fix software vulnerabilities, which hackers can exploit. Cash-strapped election officials are scrambling to address this issue and what's essentially a one-year extension on additional costs.

The promise of free updates does not address the cost of putting them in place or the time and cost of certifying such changes to a voting system. Fixing a new vulnerability requires that the companies resubmit the voting system for recertification, which can take weeks or even months.

At a U.S. Election Assistance Commission forum last month, Microsoft's Ginny Badanes, who heads its Defending Democracy Program, said that election administrators should not be forced to make the difficult choice of "using election systems with known vulnerabilities or applying security patches and, in so doing, taking their systems out of certification."


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @11:31PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 21 2019, @11:31PM (#896945)

    And Dimples replies, "one slightly lower than the other."