We've heard a lot about alleged cyber attacks and interference in elections over the pas few months - the surprise outcome from the US elections, the French avoiding online voting for their current Presidential elections and now the NCSC being galvanised to avoid the upcoming UK general elections being compromised (see article above).
You can't help but think that this is only the start of the these type of attacks, but what can be done to prevent them? And will we always have to cast a vote by visiting a polling station and casting our vote with paper and pencil (as we do in the UK)? Can we ever move to electronic voting whilst maintaining the integrity of our democratic systems?
The more we evolve is the more risk we put our self in as much as traditional way seems fine we really need to improve and find solutions to new and modern ways because they have more benefits
A solution is to simply allow each person who votes online be able to go back and check later that their vote was counted for the correct things. Give them a 2-day time window to go back and double check, before the results are locked down. This whole issue underscores the importance of maintaining very secure websites though. I have a few websites myself, and I always take professional advice for security. You can get it in a lot of places, like SecuritySpend.me, or other such web services.
Is it any wonder that Russians like to take a poke at us, given the way we behave towards them? I share this opinion with a former British ambassador to Moscow.
Russia has been the bogeyman for over a hundred years, Russian agents on the Northwest frontier, a spot on the Russian border and far far away from little old England. UK military exercises in Lithuania, can you imagine Russian military exercises in the Republic of Ireland? NATO eastward expansion beyond our promises when they agreed to take the wall down. Our intervention in Ukraine. Their young people have abundant cyber skills, unlike ours, and of course they will put them to use.
Which particular intervention in Ukraine do you mean?
As for training in Lithuanian forests, vs exercising in fields near Dublin, I cannot imagine that Russia does not have comparable landscapes to whatever they could find in ROI, whilst Britain does not have comparable landscapes to what may be found in Lithuania. - much like when forces train in Norway, it's about the snow and cold weather training over the proximity to Russia.
We've been training in Norway for decades, but moving to Lithuania is political sabre rattling. Beside the point, which is that we wouldn't like it if they did it to us, we get excited enough about the odd surveillance plane over the North Sea. Ukraine had the potential to be a bridge between the Eastern Bloc & Europe, with the geographical position, and the split between ethnic German & Russian populations. Not good news for Uncle Sam, so it was fixed, much like many other nation states have been "fixed".
