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Georgia election server at center of important lawsuit, had not one but two critical vulnerabilities that officials failed to patch: Shellshock & Drupalgeddon. A hacker apparently used Shellshock to breach the system in Dec. 2014, according to new evidence politico.com/news/2020/01/1…
Security expert for plaintiffs examined mirror image of server and found that a user account named "shellshock" was added to server Dec. 2, 2014. The user then patched the Shellshock vuln (common hacker behavior to keep other intruders out).
It appears intruder may have altered the bash history file as well to erase some of his activity. The new info, coupled with previous problems with the server that I wrote about in 2017, raise important questions about the integrity of Georgia's elections. politico.com/magazine/story…
From the security experts affidavit filed in Georgia court today:
It's unclear if intruder was still in system in 2016 or if he/she altered data on server or placed malware to infect election officials who accessed it. This is unclear because Georgia never did forensic invest., even after security researcher told GA the server was not secure.
In any case, the Center for Election Systems, which owned and operated the vulnerable and potentially hacked server, was in charge of programming all of the state's voting machines before every election and distributing the state's voter registration database to counties.
An expert I spoke w/ for this story told me the evidence indicates that the breach was likely done thru an automated script that scanned the internet for any systems vulnerable to Shellshock, then created user account named "shellshock" on the server and automatically patched it.
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