Kim Zetter

Yesterday prosecutors in Florida took the unusual move of charging voting machine vendor Smartmatic with violating Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for a bribery/money-laundering scheme aimed at winning contracts overseas (Smartmatic currently only supplies voting machines in the US to Los Angeles County). Previously the feds had charged only three executives of the company. Charging a company is rare, so it raises questions of why the feds have added the company to the indictment. Last February, Trump paused all enforcement of the FCPA and ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to review all current cases being investigated/prosecuted under FCPA. Any cases allowed to continue after this have to be specifically authorized by the AG, suggesting that Bondi must have authorized adding Smartmatic to the indictment. I spoke with a former federal prosecutor who says charging Smartmatic may be political. Smartmatic is currently embroiled in lawsuits against Trump supporters after the President and allies accused the company of vote-rigging in the 2020 election to give Biden the win. Here's my piece about it. [Note: I wrote this for my own Zero Day publication instead of a media outlet. If you appreciate my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to Zero Day.]

ZERO DAY

Voting Machine Company Smartmatic Charged in Federal Indictment That Previously Only Charged Executives

The Justice Department has filed charges for the first time against a voting machine company whose systems are used in Los Angeles County, one of t...

Posting this because the email address is so ridiculous (and yet people probably clicked on it anyway). WSJ published a story yesterday about hackers from China posing as House committee chair Rep. John Moolenaar to send a phishing email to trade groups, law firms and U.S. government agencies. I got hold of the email and the sender address is: johnmoolenaar.mail.house.gov@zohomail.com https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/china-trade-talks-spy-5c4801ca

Two years ago when researchers found and publicly exposed an intentional backdoor in a TETRA encryption algorithm used to secure radio communications for police/military/intel agencies around the world -- the algorithm involved a key advertised as one strength but secretly reduced to 32 bits -- the European organization that produced the algorithm told users that to secure their communications they could deploy an end-to-end encryption solution on top of the backdoor'd algorithm. Now the same researchers say they found a security problem with the end-to-end solution as well -- another reduced key. Here's my story for Wired:

WIRED

Encryption Made for Police and Military Radios May Be Easily Cracked

Researchers found that an encryption algorithm likely used by law enforcement and special forces can have weaknesses that could allow an attacker t...