"Trump advances so many lies already, so much disinformation, so many claims, that it's very difficult to shift things such that Biden would have to respond to it," Watts says.

As the director of the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Krebs oversaw the country's election preparedness , grappling not only with potential foreign hacking threats but a firehose of disinformation from President Donald Trump and his associates.

Then came 2020.Under pressure from politicians, activists, and media, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all made policy changes and enforcement decisions this year that they had long resisted—from labeling false information from prominent accounts to attempting to thwart viral spread to taking down posts by the president of the United States.

As he had telegraphed for months before Election Day , incumbent Donald Trump has attempted to discredit this year's electoral process on the grounds that expanded mail voting and the counting delays it caused in some states represent large-scale fraud.

But it turns out that when Trump got into stuff that really violated policy—like Covid or election misinformation, or what might be interpreted as calls to violence—Facebook and Twitter began to place warning labels on his posts.

If you’d just copied the 2016 results, you would have had a Republican victory, and as of Thursday it looks like Joe Biden won the presidential election with victories in many key states and a slightly higher share of the national vote than Hillary Clinton received four years ago.

"We are seeing historic levels of cooperation among federal agencies and state and local election officials to secure this election and to adapt to the Covid-19 pandemic," says Mark Lindeman, acting codirector of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan nonprofit that promotes election system integrity.

Later in the debate, Trump would cite examples of supposed mail ballot fraud in states like New York and Virginia that do not proactively send ballots—and are therefore conducting mail-in voting in a way that passes muster, by his definition.

With more Americans than ever working, going to school, and gathering online, social media platforms have an urgent responsibility to step up in order to ensure the integrity of this election.

The October issue of WIRED took a close , in-depth look at the state of election security.

In a blog post, Mark Zuckerberg laid out Facebook’s latest election-related policies, including its plan to deal with the possibility that a winner won’t be officially declared on Election Day. The company plans to use its new Voting Information Center “to prepare people for the possibility that it may take a while to get official results.” On Election Day, the information center will include authoritative information from Reuters and the National Election Pool.

Also, thanks to Pattinson's liberal use of eye makeup, it looks an awful lot like The Crow, right down to the 1990s soundtrack.

Here’s how in-person voting should look during the coronavirus pandemic: lots of polling places, fully staffed with well-protected election workers, each serving small numbers of voters who are able to quickly get in and out without having to congregate at length in close quarters.

We'll get to the rest of this week's security news in just a second, but before all that you need to carve out a little chunk of your day to read WIRED senior writer Andy Greenberg's profile of Marcus Hutchins , the hacker who stopped the berserking WannaCry ransomware three years ago.

The pandemic has fueled debate about contact-tracing apps, but researchers say that it is possible to design encryption schemes for such services in a way that would successfully protect user privacy.

Election security has become a more prominent (and urgent) topic in the United States over the past few years, but as the Covid-19 pandemic rages, a different type of crisis is also presenting itself: how to carry out voting in a way that maintains both social distancing and electoral integrity.

An election plus a budding epidemic could be an equation for disaster: thousands of people crowded together in polling places, waiting in lines, touching the same door handles and voting machines—or, fearing the prospect of germs, bailing on the whole thing, driving down turnout.

And while Bloomberg may have been the first to deploy this particular advertising tactic, he's not the first candidate to use influencers to try to gain traction on the internet —and it's a strategy we're likely to see a whole lot more of as elections heat up.

This afternoon, its organizers released findings from this year's event—including urgent vulnerabilities from a decade ago that still plague voting machines currently in use.Participants vetted dozens of voting machines at Defcon this year, including a prototype model built on secure, verified hardware through a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program.

Mobile voting could indeed increase voter participation, but it’s plagued by security issues in search of a solution.But it depends on people, with all their flaws, and on connections to older, not totally secure technologies, like the internet.

Legislation called the Secure Elections Act, cosponsored by senators James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) last year, aimed to shore up the nation's election security by providing states with new money to phase out paperless systems.

The Russian meddling that rocked the 2016 United States presidential election gave the public a full view of something election officials and advocates have warned about for years: weak voting infrastructure and election systems around the US, and a lack of political will and funding to strengthen them.

Like a lot of other similarly intricate ideas, quadratic voting sets out to solve a fundamental problem in the field of “social choice,” which is to say, how groups of people choose what they want.

The information I found on the drives, including candidates, precincts, and the number of votes cast on the machine, were not encrypted. By using a $15 palm-sized device, my team was able to exploit a smart chip card, allowing us to vote multiple times.

Where It Blew Up: Twitter, media reports What Really Happened: You might remember that President Trump declared a national emergency to fund his pet border wall a month ago as a way of saving face after the government shutdown standoff ended with him gaining absolutely nothing that he’d wanted.

Security News This Week: Beto O'Rourke Was Part of an Infamous '90s Hacker Group PAUL RATJE/Getty Images This week ended with terror, as a shooting in New Zealand took the lives of at least 49 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

States Need Way More Money to Fix Crumbling Voting Machines “We are driving the same car in 2019 that we were driving in 2004, and the maintenance costs are mounting,” one official told the Brennan Center for Justice in a new survey.

“We are working closely with the supplier to make sure that by the time we’re close to using most of the stockpile, the outbreak will be under control,” says Fall.John Wessels/AFP/Getty ImagesHealth care workers also worry that the upcoming Christian holiday, when many people travel to be with their families, will spread the infection to new areas.

But New Knowledge’s report, released Monday, shows a much more sustained and purposeful focus on black Americans—as the IRA went about instigating mistrust in law enforcement and political institutions, while cultivating seemingly authentic narratives of black pride.The report details how black Americans were among the most exploited online communities by the IRA, cataloging how the Russian firm developed an “expansive cross-platform media mirage” that specifically targeted black people by leveraging popular social media sites.

You should probably just bring it.In some states you can bring your phone into the voting booth with you, and even post a “ballot selfie,” but in others you can’t, so again, check your local election sites.