The calls started flooding in from hundreds of irate North Carolina voters just after 7 a.m. on Election Day last November.Dozens were told they were ineligible to vote and were turned away at the polls, even when they displayed current registration cards. Others were sent from one polling place to another, only to be rejected. Scores of voters were incorrectly told they had cast ballots days earlier. In one precinct, voting halted for two hours.Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books — tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters’ identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham’s software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before.

(Reuters) – More than four million records of users of Time Warner Cable’s MyTWC app were found unsecured on an Amazon server last month, digital security research center Kromtech Security Center said in a blog post on Friday.The files — more than 600 gigabytes in size containing sensitive information such as transaction ID, user names, Mac addresses, serial numbers, account numbers — were discovered on Aug. 24 without a password by researchers of Kromtech. (bit.ly/2wqgA3J)“A vendor has notified us that certain non-financial information of legacy Time Warner Cable customers who used the MyTWC app became potentially visible by external sources,” Charter Communications Inc (CHTR.O), Time Warner Cable’s parent, said in an email.

Cyber-criminals start attacking servers newly set up online about an hour after they are switched on, suggests research.The servers were part of an experiment the BBC asked a security company to carry out to judge the scale and calibre of cyber-attacks that firms face every day.About 71 minutes after the servers were set up online they were visited by automated attack tools that scanned them for weaknesses they could exploit, found security firm Cyber Reason.Once the machines had been found by the bots, they were subjected to a “constant” assault by the attack tools.Thin skinThe servers were accessible online for about 170 hours to form a cyber-attack sampling tool known as a honeypot, said Israel Barak, head of security at Cyber Reason. The servers were given real, public IP addresses and other identifying information that announced their presence online.