MashBlur

As Election Day approaches, tension is rising. Schools are canceling classes. Investors are waiting cautiously. Law enforcement is on alert for violence at polling locations. And when what seemed like half the internet shut down last week, fear of a large-scale cyberattack joined that list.
Sam Altman, president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, was one of many to ask the question: Is the U.S. about to be on the receiving end of a major attack timed for the election?
"That attack on Dyn felt to me like a warm-up to something or a practice run," Altman told Mashblur. "Like someone going after something very specific."

Following the attack, concerns about a massive effort to disrupt the internet on Election Day started to percolate in the tech community. The attack came in an election season in which cybersecurity has been an underlying concern thanks to hacking attributed to Russia.
The Dyn attack, though different from the hacks that ended up making public massive amounts of Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign emails, only added to the broader fears. The FBI has warned state election boards to be on alert — though they may be powerless to do much about significant attacks.
Cybersecurity experts that spoke with Mashable, however, were not particularly worried about large-scale attacks directed at the internet itself. They could not, however, rule anything out.

Rock the vote

Most components of US Election Day infrastructure don't rely on the internet, so an attack wouldn't directly impact actual votes. But if the internet were down, people wouldn't be able to look up polling place locations or other voting information. A widespread cyberattack could cause fear about exactly what's going on on Election Day and even sway some voters to stay home.
According to Dan Wallach, a computer science professor at Rice University who studies the security of electronic voting systems, voting machines are never connected to the internet. Voter registration databases will mostly be printed out by Election Day, but counties that allow voting in more than one polling place and use electronic voter registration information could be affected.

Media reports of election results, of course, could be knocked out of commission by a DDoS attack. And last-minute get out the vote efforts would definitely be disrupted by a cyberattack.
"That kind of attack would dramatically disrupt get out the vote efforts," Joseph Lorenzo Hall, chief technologist for the Center for Democracy and Technology, told Mashable.

Expect the worst

There are cyberattacks every day. They just usually aren't as effective as the one that took out access to several major websites and services last Friday.
Widespread problems with websites including Spotify, Netflix and Twitter, were the result of a DDoS or "distributed denial of service" attack against the domain name system host Dyn.
Unidentified hackers used 100,000 devices to overwhelm Dyn's DNS systems. By overwhelming Dyn with traffic from what were likely poorly protected devices like connected TVs and DVRs, hackers were able to prevent people from accessing any website that relied on Dyn's DNS services.

DDoS attacks are relatively simple and only require massive scale, not complex skill. Since the attacks don't need to target only one website and can instead take down huge swaths of the internet, they're pretty scary on a day as big as Nov. 8.
"We see new levels of attacks, new zero days, new strains every day," Dale Drew, chief security officer for the internet service provider Level 3 Communications, told Mashable. "We have been trained to expect the worst case scenario every time we see an attack."

Learning from the past

Last week's cyberattack primarily affected the East Coast. Another attack could be geographically based, or cover a wider range. That doesn't mean it won't be as effective the next time around.
Companies like Dyn face cyberattacks every day. Most are fended off, or don't affect as many clients and people as last week's. In the aftermath of this attack, clients who use one DNS provider have already added a second or ramped up their security in other ways, Hall said.
If anything, the chances of a similar attack on Election Day are lower, Hall said.
"No one seriously going to use that to disrupt or attack elections would have done something so blatant and so public," Hall said.
No one has claimed responsibility for the recent cyberattack, but security experts know that it came from a bot net using the base code Mirai. The hackers behind the bot net were likely displaying the net's power to anyone interested in its services for hire, Hall said. He thought it unlikely the same group would try another attack so soon afterward.
Still, people are worried. Ahead of one of the most tense days in American history, cybersecurity experts advised clients of DNS providers to widen their security options.
Dyn is preparing for future attacks whether or not they fall on Election Day.
"As you may imagine, we cannot predict future DDoS attacks," Dyn spokesman Adam Coughlin told Mashable. "We have learned a great deal from the recent attack and very quickly put protective measures in place during the attack, and we are extending and scaling those measures aggressively. Additionally, Dyn has been active in discussions with internet infrastructure providers to share learnings and mitigation methods for future attacks."
And people at home — whose devices might have been part of the attack without their knowledge — should check exactly what they have plugged in before they head out to the polls.

Opinion

During an interview on last night's Bill Maher show, the noted feminist Gloria Steinem suggestedthat young women support Bernie Sanders's presidential campaign because they want attention from men.

Steinem's comments came in response to a question about the base of support for Sanders and Hillary Clinton, respectively.

"When you’re young, you’re thinking, 'Where are the boys?' The boys are with Bernie."

To suggest, as Steinem seemed to do, that young women choose their candidate to attract men is profoundly sexist and condescending. It trivializes the voting preferences of a powerful group of voters: young voters — and particularly young women — while at the same time ignoring gay women.

SEE ALSO: The bros who love Bernie Sanders have become a sexist mob

Steinem's observation also ignores the legitimate gains that Sanders has made among young people. We saw that clearly in Iowa where Sanders defeated Clinton among voters ages 17 to 29 by 70%. That's almost double the margin by which then-Senator Barack Obama won that age group in Iowa in 2008.

Here's a radical idea: Perhaps the women who turned out for Sanders in Iowa aren't boy-crazy. Perhaps they are voters who decided, after hearing the candidates make their arguments, that Sanders is the best candidate to lead the country when Obama leaves office.

Perhaps instead of writing off these voters as lovesick young girls who haplessly follow men to the ballot box, Steinem and others should talk to these young women to try to better understand what makes them Feel The Bern.

The condescension aside, this is also a pretty shocking reversal for Steinem, who, as The New Republic's Elizabeth Bruenig pointed out, once deemed Sanders an "honorary woman" during his 1996 campaign against a Republican woman.

Steinem is a Clinton supporter and wrote rather movingly this year about some of the ugliness that has been hurled Clinton's way by political opponents, dating back to former President Bill Clinton's time at the White House. There's undoubtably a lot of that during this cycle too. I've seen it on the road, on Reddit and on Twitter.

But two wrongs don't make a right. And on this point, Steinem is just dead wrong.

As a relatively young woman (I cast my first vote for President in 2008) and particularly as a black young woman in America, I value my vote and the fight by generations of organizers it took to secure it. It's a responsibility I and many of my friends take incredibly seriously and for anyone to suggest otherwise is frankly insulting.

Sorry, but when I decide who to vote for on Election Day, it will be the person I think can best represent the country, not the candidate that will most impress my boyfriend.