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Dodgy server at heart of the Trump inquiry was wiped

by on27 October 2017


So stop asking questions about it

The server computer at the centre of a lawsuit digging into dodgy cyber-security practices during the US presidential election has been wiped to stop people asking questions about it.

The server is in Georgia where Donald Trump squeaked in and gave him 16 electoral votes. The deletion of its data makes analysis of whether the computer was compromised impossible.

It is not as if the whinging liberals have nothing to complain about. There is good reason to suspect that someone fiddled with the server. For a start it was 15 years old and it is uncertain what upgrades it might have seen in its long life.

It is feared the machine may have been hacked by Russian agents, who have taken a keen interest in the 2016 White House race. Realistically, though, the server could have been turned over by a 15 year old who wanted to brag that he changed history.

Security researcher Logan Lamb had a look at the server while investigating the Kennesaw State University's Center for Election Systems and claimed it was misconfigured, exposing the state's entire voter registration records. There were multiple PDFs with instructions and passwords for election workers, and the software systems used to tally votes cast.

"You could just go to the root of where they were hosting all the files and just download everything without logging in", he said.

The files were indexed by Google, making them readily available to anyone who wanted to look.

Lamb warned the election centre but the security holes were left unpatched for seven months. He later went public after the US security services announced there had been a determined effort by the Russian government to sway the presidential elections, including looking at compromising electronic voting machines.

In an effort to force the state to scrap the system, a number of Georgia voters banded together and sued. They asked for an independent security review of the server, expecting to find flaws that would lend weight to their argument for investment in a more modern and secure system.

However a Freedom of Information Act request has revealed that just days after the lawsuit was filed, technicians at the election centre deleted the server's data on July 7.

That same email also notes that backups of the server data were also deleted more than a month after the initial wipe – just as the lawsuit moved to a federal court.

A conspiracy nut who shared the same enthusiasm for claiming that “no one ever built a nuclear weapon” might think that there was collusion between the Trump campaign team, the Republican Party, and the Russian government. Fortunately for Trump, most of the conspiracy nuts are on his side.

Certainly no one is interested in saying they ordered the server wiped. Since the server was not under a court protection order, the destruction of its data is a bit dodgy but not illegal.

Unfortunately for any would be lizard based illuminati keen on putting Trump in power, the FBI took a copy of the server's filesystem contents when it opened an investigation into the system back in March. It might still have a copy.

 

Last modified on 27 October 2017
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