Voters across multiple US states have been targeted today by robocalls telling them to stay home or come vote tomorrow, on Wednesday, due to massive turnouts and long lines at voting stations.
US citizens and authorities have reported robocalls messages in nine states, including Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.
In response to the reports, state officials have taken today to social media to dispel the misinformation shared in the robocalls, urging voters to vote in-person by 8 PM ET today, the last day of voting, and not follow the advice shared in some calls, which was trying to mislead voters by tricking them to come vote tomorrow — after polls were set to close.

We received reports that an unknown party is purposefully spreading misinformation via robocalls in Flint in an attempt to confuse voters.Let me be clear — if you plan to vote in-person, you must do so, or be in line to do so, by 8PM today.
— Governor Gretchen Whitmer (@GovWhitmer) November 3, 2020

NOTICE: We are receiving reports of robocalls telling voters to stay home. Disregard these calls. If you have not already voted, today is the day! Polls in Kansas close at 7:00 p.m. local time.Find your polling location here: https://t.co/PWjjT24hmw #Election2020 #ksleg
— KS Sec. of State (@KansasSOS) November 3, 2020

However, while some messages were specifically trying to mislead voters to show up to vote on the wrong day, the vast majority of robocalls featured even simpler messages that merely tried to convince voters to stay home.
The message, which didn’t mention the voting process in an obvious attempt to avoid a possible law enforcement investigation, said: “This is just a test call. Time to stay home. Stay safe and stay home.”

UPDATE: I’m collecting confirmed robocalls to voters in Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nebraska and Georgia among others. Will continue to update. pic.twitter.com/tZ9DsV7eWQ
— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) November 3, 2020

According to the Washington Post, more than 10 million robocalls of this type have been placed today.
US officials, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), said they are aware of the campaigns and looking into the matter.
DHS says this happened before

Nevertheless, the issue doesn’t seem to alarm US federal officials too much either.
According to a Cyberscoop report, speaking on background in a press conference today, DHS officials said robocall campaigns had taken place each election cycle, and this one was not out of the ordinary.
Some of these campaigns started even before the voting process.
For example, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filed official charges on October 1 against two Republican operatives for their role in a recent campaign targeting minority voters in Michigan this fall.
Nessel identified the suspects as Jack Burkman, 54, of Virginia and Jacob Wohl, 22, of California, who, if found guilty, face up to 24 years behind bars.
According to a Reuters report, the FBI is formally investigating today’s new wave of robocall campaigns.
Federal agencies like CISA and the FBI also said that despite a few malfunctions here and there, today’s election process has not been marred by cyber-security issues. More

Oscar Wong/Getty Images Singapore has mandated the use of facial recognition as authentication for “higher risk” banking transactions, in a bid to stem growing scams in the country.  Retail banks will roll out Singpass Face Verification over the next three months to beef up the setup process for digital tokens, according to a joint statement […] More

rob dobi/Getty Images X CEO Elon Musk announced earlier this week that he’s pulling the teeth out of X’s (formerly Twitter) blocking feature. Soon, users you’ve blocked will be able to view your posts again.  Nina Owji, a web developer, posted, “X is about to remove the current block button, meaning that if an account is public, […] More

Image: ASD
The Australian Signals Directorate published a sobering The Commonwealth Cyber Security Posture in 2020 report on Thursday, with one of the bright spots being the use of scanning by the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC). Under its Cyber Hygiene Improvement Programs (CHIPs), the ACSC was able to identify vulnerable, internet-exposed MobileIron systems across Commonwealth, state and territory, and local governments. “The ACSC notified all government entities operating vulnerable devices of the device details, the critical vulnerability and the urgent need to patch or otherwise mitigate the risk,” the report said. “This timely and actionable information from the ACSC allowed some government entities to pre-empt adversary exploitation of their MobileIron devices, in one case by hours.” The report said the 2020 MobileIron and Citrix vulnerabilities had some of the quickest turnarounds before exploitation attempts began to appear. “Reporting showed adversaries attempting to exploit these vulnerabilities within days of proof-of-concept codes being publicly released,” it said. “Organisations that cannot patch their internet-facing services in a very timely manner, especially legacy VPNs and websites, must improve their patching capability. Adopting software-as-a-service or platform-as-a-service cloud approaches to internet-facing services may assist.” This is bad
Image: ASD

Elsewhere, the report said while in absolute terms the cyber posture of Commonwealth entities was improving, the shift was glacial in 2020. For instance, the report said entities were improving application hardening, but only 12% of entities got better. Similarly, 10.5% were doing application control properly, and 9.5% more entities could say they were restricting admin privileges properly. The blame for the slow pace was placed with entities continuing to use obsolete and unsupported operating systems and applications, not embracing cloud services, organisations not having fast or flexible modernisation strategies, a cyber skills shortage, and organisations continuing to “misunderstand, misinterpret and inconsistently” the Essential Eight. In a government response tabled on Wednesday, the government is considering making the Essential Eight essential for its entities. This is very, very bad
Image: ASD
Restricting adherence to merely the Top Four of the Essential Eight showed 11% of organisations self-reported at the lowest level of compliance, followed by 55% at the second step of the four step system, with 33% at the third level, and only 1% being fully compliant. The policy with the lowest level of maturity was “safeguarding information from cyber threats”. On the plus side, CHIPs is now able to track “cyber hygiene indicators” across 71,300 active Commonwealth government domains, an improvement of 54,300 domains in the year from February 2020, and covers the sites of 187 entities. Across 2020, CHIPs gained the ability to scan for encrypted email use; whether government sites were running up-to-date software, displaying default websites or using expired certificates; scanning for critical vulnerabilities; and advising government entities at all levels on services they have open to the wider internet. During the year, ACSC created a Protective Domain Name System that blocks domains associated with malware, ransomware, phishing attacks, and other malicious content. “Under the pilot, the ACSC processed approximately 2 billion queries from eight Commonwealth entities over the period from April to December 2020 — and blocked 4683 unique malicious cyber threats, preventing over 150,000 threat events,” the report said. “In 2021–22, the capability will be offered to all Commonwealth entities.” Australia is so bad at cyber
Image: ASD
The report stated approximately one quarter of entities are now using DMARC to prevent email spoofing. Across the year, ACSC said it responded to 434 cyber incidents, of which 46% were self-reported and the remainder were found through “ACSC investigations, reporting from international partners and third parties, and analysis of a variety of classified and open-source material”. The next report will be handed to government in November 2022 and cover from January 2021 to June 2022. From 2023, the reports will focus on cyber posture across a single financial year. Related Coverage More

T-Mobile has confirmed a data breach that was caused in part by SIM swapping attacks, according to a statement from the company.The T-Mo Report, a blog tracking T-Mobile, obtained internal reports showing that some data was leaked from a subset of customers. 

Some individuals had their customer proprietary network information (CPNI) leaked, which includes information about a customer’s plan, the number of lines, the phone numbers, the billing account, and more. Others had their SIMs swapped. Some were victims of both the CPNI leak and the SIM swaps.When pressed for comment by ZDNet, T-Mobile refused to go into detail about the attack and would not say how many customers were affected in the incident.”Our people and processes worked as designed to protect our customers from this type of attempted fraud that unfortunately occurs all too frequently in our industry,” a T-Mobile representative said in response to questions from ZDNet. The company told CNET and Bleeping Computer that it sent notices to “a small number of customers” who were dealing with SIM swapping attacks, calling the attacks “a common industry-wide occurrence.”

A T-Mobile representative tweeted to say the company “is taking immediate steps to help protect all individuals who may be at risk from this cyberattack.” The company experienced a massive data breach in August that exposed sensitive information from over 50 million current, former, and prospective customers. This included names, addresses, social security numbers, driver’s licenses, and ID information. T-Mobile users have long criticized the carrier for its lackluster support for SIM swapping victims. The company has repeatedly announced SIM swapping attacks and data breaches since 2018.  More