High Alert.

How to load a dishwasher.

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1. Some of the best hackers in the world gathered in Las Vegas over the weekend to try to break into voting machines that will be used in this year’s election — all with an eye to helping officials identify and fix vulnerabilities. Organizers and participants at the DEF CON Voting Village found cyber vulnerabilities in everything from voting machines to e-poll books. The problem? Their findings will likely come too late to make any fixes before Nov. 5. In one sense, it’s the normal course of events: Every August, hackers at the DEF CON conference find security gaps in voting equipment, and every year the long and complex process of fixing them means nothing is implemented until the next electoral cycle. But Election Day security is under particular scrutiny in 2024. That’s both because of increasing worries that foreign adversaries will figure out how to breach machines, and because President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of widespread fraud in 2020 undermined confidence in the vote among his supporters. As a result, many in the election security community are bemoaning the fact that no system has been developed to roll out fixes faster. (Source: politico.com, italics mine)

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2. The FBI is investigating suspected hacking attempts by Iran targeting both a Trump associate and advisers to the Biden-Harris campaign, according to people familiar with the matter, as the agency formally acknowledged Monday it has opened a high-stakes national security investigation months before Election Day. Three staffers on the Biden-Harris campaign received spear phishing emails that were designed to appear legitimate but could give an intruder access to the recipients’ communications, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a sensitive investigation. So far, investigators have not found evidence that those hacking attempts were successful, these people said. (Source: washingtonpost.com)

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3. Many U.S. election officials are girding for a potential October surprise powered by artificial intelligence — a piece of deepfaked audio or visual content, perhaps impersonating a candidate or poll worker, that cannot be debunked in time. The technology could also supercharge harassment campaigns, making it easier to blitz districts with frivolous public records requests asking for an overly broad range of documents, such as voter history files over an unspecified time frame, officials said. Last week, a bipartisan group of secretaries of state wrote to the tech billionaire Elon Musk to urge him to fix his A.I.-powered search assistant, Grok chatbot, saying it provided inaccurate information about ballot deadlines and then failed to correct the mistake for 10 days. (Sources: nytimes.com, electioninnovation.org, sos.state.mn.us)