Starting today at the Aspen Security Forum we’re demonstrating the first voting system running Microsoft ElectionGuard as an example of how ElectionGuard can enable a new era of secure, verifiable voting. The demo shows how it’s also possible to make voting more accessible for people with disabilities and more affordable for local governments while increasing security. Finding new ways to ensure that voters can trust the election process has never been more important. The world’s democracies remain under attack as new data we are sharing today makes clear. ElectionGuard and the range of offerings from Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program, as well as tools from others in the technology industry and academia are needed more than ever to help defend democracy.

Let’s start with a quick look at the newest data available to us. In the past year, Microsoft has notified nearly 10,000 customers they’ve been targeted or compromised by nation-state attacks. About 84% of these attacks targeted our enterprise customers, and about 16% targeted consumer personal email accounts. While many of these attacks are unrelated to the democratic process, this data demonstrates the significant extent to which nation-states continue to rely on cyberattacks as a tool to gain intelligence, influence geopolitics or achieve other objectives.

The majority of nation-state activity in this period originated from actors in three countries – Iran, North Korea and Russia. We have seen extensive activity from the actors we call Holmium and Mercury operating from Iran, Thallium operating from North Korea, and two actors operating from Russia we call Yttrium and Strontium. This data has been compiled by the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center which works every day to track these global threats. We build this intelligence into our security products to protect customers and use it in support of our efforts to disrupt threat actor activities through direct legal action or in collaboration with law enforcement. But let’s be clear – cyberattacks continue to be a significant tool and weapon wielded in cyberspace. In some instances, those attacks appear to be related to ongoing efforts to attack the democratic process.

Since the launch of Microsoft AccountGuard last August, we have uncovered attacks specifically targeting organizations that are fundamental to democracy. We have steadily expanded AccountGuard, our threat notification service for political campaigns, parties, and democracy-focused nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to include 26 countries across four continents. While this service is relatively new, we’ve already made 781 notifications of nation-state attacks targeting organizations participating in AccountGuard. This data shows that democracy-focused organizations in the United States should be particularly concerned as 95% of these attacks have targeted U.S.-based organizations. By nature, these organizations are critical to society but have fewer resources to protect against cyberattacks than large enterprises.

Many of the democracy-focused attacks we’ve seen recently target NGOs and think tanks, and reflect a pattern that we also observed in the early stages of some previous elections. In this pattern, a spike in attacks on NGOs and think tanks that work closely with candidates and political parties, or work on issues central to their campaigns, serve as a precursor to direct attacks on campaigns and election systems themselves. We saw such attacks in the U.S. presidential election in 2016 and in the last French presidential election. In 2018 we announced attacks targeting, among others, leading U.S. senatorial candidates and think tanks associated with key issues at the time. Earlier this year we saw attacks targeting democracy-focused NGOs in Europe close to European elections. As we head into the 2020 elections, given both the broad reliance on cyberattacks by nation-states and the use of cyberattacks to specifically target democratic processes, we anticipate that we will see attacks targeting U.S. election systems, political campaigns or NGOs that work closely with campaigns.

So the problem is real and unabated. It is time to find solutions. Governments and civil society have important roles to play, but the tech industry also has a responsibility to help defend democracy. As part of our contribution at Microsoft, we believe ElectionGuard will be an important tool to protect the voting process and to ensure that all voters can trust the outcome of free democratic elections. We are excited that attendees of the Aspen Security Forum will be able to try our ElectionGuard demo. While ElectionGuard can run on a range of new or existing voting systems using hardware from a variety of manufacturers, the demo we’re showing this week was built using a Microsoft Surface tablet in kiosk mode, an Xbox Adaptive Controller as an optional accessible input device, and a standard printer.

Our ElectionGuard demo will showcase three core features.

First, people will be able to vote directly on the screen of the Microsoft Surface or using the Xbox Adaptive Controller, which Microsoft originally built in close partnership with organizations like the Cerebral Palsy Foundation to meet the needs of gamers with limited mobility. We hope this will help show the community how accessibility hardware can be built securely and inexpensively into primary voting systems and no longer requires separate voting machines to meet the needs of those with disabilities – ultimately making it easier for more people to vote.

Second, people using the demo will be provided with a tracking code that, when voting is complete, they will be able to enter into a website to confirm their vote was counted and not altered; the website will not display their actual votes. In the ElectionGuard software development kit (SDK) this verification feature will be enabled by homomorphic encryption, which allows mathematical procedures – like counting votes – to be done while keeping the data of people’s actual votes fully encrypted. The use of homomorphic encryption in election systems was pioneered by Microsoft Research under the leadership of Senior Cryptographer Josh Benaloh.  This tracking code is a key feature of the ElectionGuard technology.  For the first time voters will be able to independently verify with certainty that their vote was counted and not altered.  Importantly, in its final form the ElectionGuard SDK will also enable voting officials, the media, or any third party to use a “verifier” application to similarly confirm that the encrypted vote was properly counted and not altered.

Third, the demo will show how ElectionGuard can enable end-to-end verifiable elections for the first time while retaining the familiarity and certainty of paper ballots. The demo will provide voters with a printed record of their votes, which they can check and place into a physical ballot box, with verification through the web portal serving as a supplemental layer of security and verifiability.

ElectionGuard is free and open-source and will be available through GitHub as an SDK later this summer. This week’s demo is simply one sample of the many ways ElectionGuard can be used to improve voting, and the final SDK will also enable features like Risk Limiting Audits to compare ballots with ballot counts and other post-election audits.

We will not distribute commercial voting systems like the one we’re demoing this week but instead are partnering with the community of election technology suppliers that already serve state and local governments. We previously announced that we have partnerships with suppliers that build and sell more than half of the voting systems used in the United States today. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re also now partnering with Smartmatic and Clear Ballot, two of the leading voting technology vendors, and Dominion Voting Systems is actively exploring the inclusion of ElectionGuard in their offerings.

In the coming months, we will also announce new details about our partnership with Columbia University’s Columbia World Projects. Columbia professors in statistics, political science, computer science, and international and public affairs will be joining forces with Microsoft to bring ElectionGuard to life by piloting the technology in the 2020 elections.

No one solution alone can address cyberattacks from nation-states. As we’ve seen, attackers will take any avenue to gain intelligence and disrupt the democratic process. That’s why Microsoft’s Defending Democracy Program has also offered Microsoft 365 for Campaigns and AccountGuard to protect political campaigns, parties and democracy-focused NGOs, and it’s why we’ve partnered with NewsGuard to defend against disinformation.

At the same time, no single company can tackle these issues, and the need to protect democracy is more important than corporate competition. We applaud similar contributions from companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google; it’s also why Microsoft’s Defending Democracy program is supporting efforts from those like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Belfer Center, Columbia World Projects at Columbia University, research underway by Princeton University, and the Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Project.

At the Aspen Security Forum and in the months to come we need to have an honest conversation about threats, but more importantly a conversation about all the emerging tools available to stop them. Microsoft and our Defending Democracy program are committed to our responsibility to the United States and other world democracies to provide tools and technology to combat these threats.  As you read this post and participate in the Aspen Security Forum discussions in person or over social media, I hope you’ll give equal thought both to the problems and to the solutions.

Tags: cybersecurity, Defending Democracy Program, ElectionGuard, elections

Ubisoft’s free-to-play arena fighter Brawlhalla begins its 2019 Heatwave Event on 17th July (aka. later today). It runs until 7th August and adds new and old summer-themed skins and items. In saying this, it’s the first time Switch owners will be able to participate in this annual event, so technically everything is new.

Here’s exactly what you can unlock:

• Heatwave colors for all Legends, available for 1,500 Gold or 10 Mammoth coins each
• 2019 Heatwave podium, available for 240 Mammoth coins
• Endless Heatwave animated avatar, available for 60 Mammoth coins
• Ice Kor-eam avatar, available for 6,000 Gold
• Legend skins, available for 140 Mammoth coins each (each Legend skin comes with two weapon skins):
  
  • New for 2019: Brawl Dad Isaiah skin
    
    • Comes with animated Grilled Smoker Cannon – steaks included
  • New for 2019: Thor by the Shore skin
  • Wipeout Nix skin
  • Dog Days Mordex skin
  • Atlantean Orion skin
  • Water Wars Cross skin
  • Pool Party Diana skin
• Hot Lava KO effect available for 240 Mammoth coins

In celebration of the game’s Summer Championship, taking place later this month on 27th – 28th July, the following items will also be availalbe in the Malhalla tomorrow until 7th August:

• The Beach Bash Gauntlets skin, available for 60 Mammoth Coins
• Summer Shard 2019 animated avatar, available for 60 Mammoth Coins

If you would like to find out more about this free-to-play Switch eShop game, be sure to read our review.

Will you be participating in the Brawlhalla Heatwave event? Leave a comment below.

Click Here!

Transform recently sat down with several Microsoft customers at an event highlighting emerging trends in data and artificial intelligence (AI). We spoke with Jean Lozano, chief technology officer at MediaValet, a cloud-based digital asset management (DAM) system, which helps customers of all sizes manage their growing digital media libraries.

TRANSFORM: What is a DAM and what business problem does it solve?

JEAN LOZANO: A DAM is like a video or photo library, but it can handle way more than that. It’s typically used by enterprise marketing teams to provide a single source of truth for all brand and marketing content.

The big challenge with digital media is that it’s unstructured by nature, so discoverability can be a problem. A lot of companies invest tens of thousands of dollars in creating digital media and infographics, but its lack of searchable data makes them hard to find.

A DAM implementation contains anywhere from 10,000 to several-million digital media [items] that are put into a central repository and tagged to make them discoverable. Having just one person as the curator of the digital library is way too much, and that’s where AI comes in.

TRANSFORM: How does AI help you serve your customers?

LOZANO: We’re betting big on Azure AI to make MediaValet the most intelligent DAM out there. We’ve seen it in various deal cycles that we would not have otherwise won. It’s just a matter of demonstrating capabilities.

So, for example, one of the hottest technologies that we can demo is our capability for video indexing, which other DAMs cannot offer right now. Video is the fastest growing media out there, so when our customers can actually see their videos getting analyzed and made discoverable, they can see the value it adds.

As an example, we have a huge video production house as a customer. Every time they do a shoot, it’s a 500-gigabyte upload to MediaValet. But, they also have to generate video transcriptions. With video indexing, we [provide] the transcriptions as soon as they load it on our system, so they don’t have to send the files [elsewhere] for manual transcription. Does that improve their workflow? Definitely.

TRANSFORM: Have your customers fully embraced the changes and the new technologies?

LOZANO:  Many of our customers are digital asset curators, and some of them probably fear that AI is going to replace them. But the guiding principle for AI is assistance, not replacement. AI is going to make their lives easier. It will enrich the data that they’re producing, but it doesn’t replace them.

TRANSFORM: How does AI make life easier for a digital asset curator?

LOZANO: We have a couple of customers that are sports franchises that are creating millions of images. These teams have been there for decades and decades. One hockey team had about 50 petabytes of video clips. So, how do you work through millions of images and hundreds of thousands of hours of video?

Machine learning is actually helping with that now. For example, you can detect a jersey number and see who is the player that wears that number. We can actually make those images easy to use for marketers, or the communications team when they look for brand approved images.

In May, it was discovered Natsume would be releasing a complete version of Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition. This game was originally released last year and outperformed Natsume’s expectations.

Now, the worldwide publisher and developer, has announced Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition Complete will be released on the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4 on 30th July. It includes all of the DLC ($18 value) and will be available digitally and physically in the US, for $29.99.

The president and CEO of Natsume Hiro Maekawa said this complete version was “the ultimate” Harvest Moon fan pack and mentioned how there are “endless possibilities” on each playthrough as there is so much DLC to enjoy.

Here’s a little more from the PR:

Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition Complete has special features made specifically for consoles and introduces Soleil, a new character who uses their Gem Sprite magic to help around the farm with new Co-Op Play. Grab a friend, and they’ll be able to control Soleil. Soleil will be able to grow crops, tend livestock, and gather materials. Farm work has never been so easy!

All four DLC are included in Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition Complete; this includes Decorations & Tool Upgrade Pack, Divine Marriageable Characters Pack, New Marriageable Characters Pack, and Doc and Melanie’s Special Episodes.

In Harvest Moon: Light of Hope Special Edition Complete, players begin the game as they set out looking for a fresh start and new surroundings. During their voyage, their ship is hit by a storm and goes down. As they drift into a small harbor town, now in a shambles from the storm, it will be up to the player to help rebuild the town and save the lighthouse…but it won’t be easy! Nevertheless, with some hard work growing crops, tending livestock, and gathering materials for repairs, players will be able to make new friends, start a family, revive the lighthouse, and save the town!

Here is the game’s box art and some screenshots:

Will you be adding this Harvest Moon game to your Switch library? Tell us down in the comments.

Sometimes one network interface isn’t enough. Network bonding allows multiple network connections to act together with a single logical interface. You might do this because you want more bandwidth than a single connection can handle. Or maybe you want to switch back and forth between your wired and wireless networks without losing your network connection.

The latter applies to me. One of the benefits to working from home is that when the weather is nice, it’s enjoyable to work from a sunny deck instead of inside. But every time I did that, I lost my network connections. IRC, SSH, VPN — everything goes away, at least for a moment while some clients reconnect. This article describes how I set up network bonding on my Fedora 30 laptop to seamlessly move from the wired connection my laptop dock to a WiFi connection.

In Linux, interface bonding is handled by the bonding kernel module. Fedora does not ship with this enabled by default, but it is included in the kernel-core package. This means that enabling interface bonding is only a command away:

sudo modprobe bonding

Note that this will only have effect until you reboot. To permanently enable interface bonding, create a file called bonding.conf in the /etc/modules-load.d directory that contains only the word “bonding”.

Now that you have bonding enabled, it’s time to create the bonded interface. First, you must get the names of the interfaces you want to bond. To list the available interfaces, run:

sudo nmcli device status

You will see output that looks like this:

DEVICE          TYPE      STATE         CONNECTION         
enp12s0u1       ethernet  connected     Wired connection 1
tun0            tun       connected     tun0               
virbr0          bridge    connected     virbr0             
wlp2s0          wifi      disconnected  --      
p2p-dev-wlp2s0  wifi-p2p disconnected  --      
enp0s31f6       ethernet  unavailable   --      
lo              loopback  unmanaged     --                 
virbr0-nic      tun       unmanaged     --        

In this case, there are two (wired) Ethernet interfaces available. enp12s0u1 is on a laptop docking station, and you can tell that it’s connected from the STATE column. The other, enp0s31f6, is the built-in port in the laptop. There is also a WiFi connection called wlp2s0. enp12s0u1 and wlp2s0 are the two interfaces we’re interested in here. (Note that it’s not necessary for this exercise to understand how network devices are named, but if you’re interested you can see the systemd.net-naming-scheme man page.)

The first step is to create the bonded interface:

sudo nmcli connection add type bond ifname bond0 con-name bond0

In this example, the bonded interface is named bond0. The “con-name bond0” sets the connection name to bond0; leaving this off would result in a connection named bond-bond0. You can also set the connection name to something more human-friendly, like “Docking station bond” or “Ben”

The next step is to add the interfaces to the bonded interface:

sudo nmcli connection add type ethernet ifname enp12s0u1 master bond0 con-name bond-ethernet
sudo nmcli connection add type wifi ifname wlp2s0 master bond0 ssid Cotton con-name bond-wifi

As above, the connection name is specified to be more descriptive. Be sure to replace enp12s0u1 and wlp2s0 with the appropriate interface names on your system. For the WiFi interface, use your own network name (SSID) where I use “Cotton”. If your WiFi connection has a password (and of course it does!), you’ll need to add that to the configuration, too. The following assumes you’re using WPA2-PSK authentication

sudo nmcli connection modify bond-wifi wifi-sec.key-mgmt wpa-psk
sudo nmcli connection edit bond-wif

The second command will bring you into the interactive editor where you can enter your password without it being logged in your shell history. Enter the following, replacing password with your actual password

set wifi-sec.psk password
save
quit

Now you’re ready to start your bonded interface and the secondary interfaces you created

sudo nmcli connection up bond0
sudo nmcli connection up bond-ethernet
sudo nmcli connection up bond-wifi

You should now be able to disconnect your wired or wireless connections without losing your network connections.

A caveat: using other WiFi networks

This configuration works well when moving around on the specified WiFi network, but when away from this network, the SSID used in the bond is not available. Theoretically, one could add an interface to the bond for every WiFi connection used, but that doesn’t seem reasonable. Instead, you can disable the bonded interface:

sudo nmcli connection down bond0

When back on the defined WiFi network, simply start the bonded interface as above.

Fine-tuning your bond

By default, the bonded interface uses the “load balancing (round-robin)” mode. This spreads the load equally across the interfaces. But if you have a wired and a wireless connection, you may want to prefer the wired connection. The “active-backup” mode enables this. You can specify the mode and primary interface when you are creating the interface, or afterward using this command (the bonded interface should be down):

sudo nmcli connection modify bond0 +bond.options "mode=active-backup,primary=enp12s0u1"

The kernel documentation has much more information about bonding options.