Schuylkill DA Eyes Dispute in Campaign: Controller Candidate Says Web Address Trick Violated Election Laws.
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By Chris Parker, The Morning Call, Allentown, Pa.  May 24--Schuylkill County's district attorney will determine whether charges should be filed because the Republican controller candidate took over Internet domain names referring to his Democratic opponent.
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Note to political candidates: The Federal Election Commission doesn't want fundraisers using your name in vain. Even if you're the one getting the cash.
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A volunteer Maryland election worker touched off a frenzied legal effort in Montgomery County yesterday after he refused to return a touch-screen voting machine, telling state election officials he intended to let an expert hired by CBS News examine it.
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State lawmakers want to revise Pennsylvania's "cyberschool" law following a dispute over taxpayer money spent on the children of U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum.
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As the United States' presidential candidates pinball their way across New Hampshire on the day of the state's closely watched primary elections, a new form of grassroots activism appears to be taking root across the Atlantic, in Eastern Europe, that melds dirty pool tactics with the cutting edge of malware technology.Researchers with carrier security specialists Arbor Networks claim that they recently discovered several additional incidents of botnet-driven DOS attacks that were tied to political issues. Danny McPherson, chief research officer at Arbor, will report his group's findings to the assembled computer security and law enforcement experts at next week's Department of Defense Cyber-crime conference in St. Louis.Since April 2007, when a campaign of targeted denial-of-service (DOS) attacks against Web sites controlled by the prime minister of Estonia and several regional banks were carried out with crushing results -- crippling the URLs for a period of several days -- experts have wondered aloud to what extent politics played a hand in the scheme.At the time, press reports and IT security experts speculated that tension between Estonia and Russia -- sparked by Estonia's decision to move a Soviet-era World War II memorial of a bronze soldier -- may have motivated the coordinated DOS attacks. With a number of well-known malware distribution and botnet control networks based out of the region, experts speculated that Russian hackers, either on their own or at the behest of a paying customer, took out the Estonian sites to display their displeasure with the statue's removal.Now new evidence has been discovered that indicates the same sort of political activism believed to have driven the 2007 Estonian Web site attacks not only exists but is becoming more popular."We spent some time after the Estonia attacks looking into this part of the world, and we've found evidence of other politically motivated botnet DOS attacks," said Jose Nazario, senior software engineer at Arbor. "It's hard to tell who is responsible for these campaigns, but they definitely appear to be tied to some recent Russian and Ukrainian elections."According to Nazario, who is known as an expert tracker of botnets -- the armies of malware-infected computers that can be controlled remotely to be used for everything from DOS campaigns to the distribution of spam -- two elections in particular appear to have drawn activity similar to the Estonia incidents.In one instance, Nazario said his team uncovered a botnet-driven DOS threat carried out against several Web sites controlled by Viktor Yanukovych, the recently defeated Ukranian prime minister, during his re-election campaign.In another incident, Nazario said that his team was able to discover a DOS campaign aimed at sites controlled by the "Other Russia" political party led by one-time 2008 Russian presidential candidate Garry Kasparov, who is more widely known as one of the greatest chess players of all time.During each of the individual attacks, banks of botnet-infected computers successfully took the candidates' sites down for several days before they were restored, according to Arbor.Additionally, Nazario said the botnets used in both sets of attacks represent the cutting-edge of the increasingly popular and sophisticated malware sub-genre.Rather than using IRC relays to communicate with each other like most traditional botnets, the politically driven threats utilized Web-based requests to speak to each other -- a much harder form of traffic to differentiate from legitimate network throughput, Nazario said.The same advanced botnets are currently being used to distribute malware and spam, but the systems also appear to have been specifically designed to help their controllers carry out different types of distributed DOS attacks, he said.Nazario said the botnets being used in Russia and the Ukraine closely resembled the zombie PC armies that have been used in years past to attack anti-spam efforts such as Spamhaus and CastleCops -- both of which have previously been targeted successfully and had their sites temporarily taken offline.The activity could also suggest that the systems are being rented out by their creators to other people for the purpose of executing their own threats -- or being built through botnet toolkit technologies being developed in the region, the expert said.Whether or not botnet activism will wash ashore in the U.S. any time soon remains unclear, but it seems apparent the trend is taking off across the pond.Nazario said it remains hard to tell if the botnet campaign tactic has become a weapon of official political entities, or merely a tool of groups acting independently to promote some cause or belief, but lean towards the latter scenario."We don't know who is behind any of this activity, and we don't want to speculate, but you have to ask yourself, is this directed by someone higher in the political organizations, or is it merely somebody who is acting as a lone vigilante?" Nazario said. "It could be that this is something that is being carried out by a handful of individuals that have some sort of belief or disagreement to promote, or it could of course represent something bigger."
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The Department of Justice has sued Pennsylvania elections officials in an attempt to give overseas voters two more weeks to cast ballots in the Nov. 2 election, according a published report.
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Republicans accused Democrats of breaking political money laws in Florida through cozy arrangements among candidates, unions and outside fund-raising groups, an allegation a top Democrat said Thursday was absurd.
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The man considered Texas' most powerful district attorney faced intense pressure to resign Wednesday following the release of sexually and racially charged messages he sent and received using his county e-mail account.
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A lawsuit filed in Florida state court Tuesday alleges that electronic voting machines in a portion of Florida's 13th Congressional District were improperly maintained and selected, causing problems in the House race there.
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A campaign consultant said he was hired by several Florida politicians over the past seven years to gather absentee ballots during their elections, a violation of state law.
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Voters who claim problems with Ohio voting machines Nov. 2 indicated fraud refiled a request with the Ohio Supreme Court on Friday to overturn the presidential results.
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A top adviser to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney appears to be behind the launch of a new Web site attacking GOP presidential rival Fred D. Thompson during his first week on the trail.
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By John Hill, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.  Feb. 3--The campaign of gubernatorial candidate Phil Angelides broke no laws when it obtained a damaging audiotape from the Web site of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, according to an investigation released Friday.
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Said the accused violated the &quot;CAN-SPAM&quot; federal law requiring e-mail containing sexually explicit images to be clearly identified.
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The arrest of a state campaign chairman highlights potential problems for the law and order candidate
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Called before Calvert's Board of Commissioners this week, the county elections administrator explained the technological failures during the Sept. 12 primary -- blaming most of the trouble on equipment delays by state officials -- and vowed that November's general election will run more smoothly.
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Pennsylvania&#39;s attorney general on Monday sued two men for allegedly violating state law by sending out junk e-mail touting an online university that grants diplomas in 72 hours.