Month: February 2020

Enlarge / Voters hold up presidential preference cards during the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucus at the Southridge Mall in Des Moines. (credit: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Iowa caucuses are the first official event of the 2020 race for the Democratic nomination. Traditionally, results from the Iowa caucuses start being released shortly after the meetings wrap up around 9 PM Central Time. But people who tuned in to see the results this evening were disappointed, as technical glitches delayed the release of results by hours. As I write this around midnight Central Time, there are still no numbers available.

It's not yet clear exactly what's happened, but early indications suggest that technical problems with the Democratic Party's reporting system are to blame. In particular, a new smartphone app for precincts to report back to party headquarters apparently isn't working properly.

A caucus isn't like a normal election where the candidate with the most votes wins. Instead, voters at each precinct site hold a meeting to select delegates to represent them at county and state meetings of the Democratic party. Voters back delegates who support their preferred presidential candidate, so votes for delegates are effectively votes for presidential candidates. But the distribution of voters at each precinct site can impact who gets the most delegates.

Enlarge / This refinery would be replaced by a green alternative once it reaches the end of its lifetime. (credit: Eni An Energy Company / Flickr)

Over the past five years, ransomware has emerged as a vexing menace that has shut down factories, hospitals, and local municipalities and school districts around the world. In recent months, researchers have caught ransomware doing something that's potentially more sinister: intentionally tampering with industrial control systems that dams, electric grids, and gas refineries rely on to keep equipment running safely.

A ransomware strain discovered last month and dubbed Ekans contains the usual routines for disabling data backups and mass-encrypting files on infected systems. But researchers at security firm Dragos found something else that has the potential to be more disruptive: code that actively seeks out and forcibly stops applications used in industrial control systems. Before starting file-encryption operations, the ransomware kills processes listed by process name in a hard-coded list within the encoded strings of the malware.

In all, Ekans kills 64 processes, including those spawned by human-machine interfaces from Honeywell, the Proficy Historian from General Electric, and licensing servers from GE Fanuc. The same 64 processes, it turns out, are targeted in a version of the MegaCortex ransomware. That version first came to light in August.