Clint Curtis, the registrar for voters in Shasta County, Calif. said he plans to hire convicted felon and election denialist Tina Peters as one of his top deputies.

Curtis said he plans to hire Peters next month as an assistant registrar, according to local news outlets, which cited text exchanges with Curtis.

CyberScoop has reached out to Shasta County’s elections office for comment.

If Peters is hired, it would represent a marriage between a conspiracy-minded election official from another state and an equally distrusting electorate.

Donald Trump won Shasta County approximately two-thirds of voters in the county in all three presidential elections dating back to 2016. Its conservative residents have adopted Trump’s rhetoric that election fraud, voting machine hacks, noncitizen voting and other problems plagued the system, and have turned their anger at local officials.

Cathy Darling Allen, Shasta County’s former registrar of voters, told CyberScoop in 2024 that she retired after decades of administering elections in the county due to persistent attacks and harassment from voters who embraced baseless election fraud conspiracy theories. 

Peters, a former Mesa County, Colo. election official, had been serving a 9-year sentence for seven felonies, including identity theft, breaking into an election office, disabling surveillance cameras, and stealing voting system software.

Peters’ prosecutor, Colorado’s state clemency advisory board, and Mesa County officials have all defended her sentence and described her as entirely unrepentant for her crimes.

Election experts have called Peters’ theft of voting system software one of the most serious breaches of election systems in history. She shared the stolen code with conservative activists, and the code eventually surfaced online.

Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted Peters’ sentence earlier this year, citing pressure from the Trump administration and arguing that her punishment violated her First Amendment rights. In doing so, Polis intervened before an appeals court could decide whether Peters deserved a reduced sentence.

“She may continue making claims about elections that I believe are false,” Polis wrote in a May Substack post defending the decision. “She may continue promoting ideas that I strongly disagree with. I hope she doesn’t. But in America, people are not sent to prison for expressing political views, however misguided those views may be.”

In response to questions about Peters, Polis’ press office referred CyberScoop to the Colorado Department of Corrections.

Department of Corrections spokesperson Alondra Gonzalez told CyberScoop in an email that as part of her parole conditions, Peters is required to get a job or participate in a full time educational or vocational program and reside in Colorado. Parolees can request to transfer to another state, but those requests would be subject to rules and procedures under the Interstate Compact for Adult Offender Supervision and require approval from both states.
Gonzalez told CyberScoop that the department has not received a request for an interstate transfer from Peters at this time.

The Shasta County board of supervisors formally censured Curtis earlier this month following investigations by the county and outside consultant firm The Oppenheimer Group found he was verbally abusive or physically threatening toward staff.

At an Aug. 11 public meeting, Shasta County Supervisor Matt Plummer cited more than 700 pages of evidence and more than half a dozen eyewitnesses.

The investigations included claims that Curtis at times threatened to “punch,” “slap in the face,” “kill” or “execute” his subordinates. Another claim alleges Curtis once threatened to remove a door where an employee was allegedly hiding from him and have the person pulled out by their hair.

Plummer prefaced his comments by saying the board’s action is “not about election integrity” and that Curtis retains all of his authority to carry out budgeted election administration for the county.

“This is about determining when a department head allegedly and through two investigations, has substantiated allegations of violating personnel codes, the codes that guide how we as a county intend to interact with our employees, what do we do about it?” Plummer said.

Senators Alex Padilla, D-Calif., and Adam Schiff, D-Calif., wrote to California Secretary of State Shirley Weber to express their “grave concern” over the possibility that Peters would have access to state election systems.

“If Shasta County puts Ms. Peters in a position to again violate election laws following her convictions, county taxpayers could be burdened with unwelcomed and potentially hefty expenses,” Padilla and Schiff wrote. “If county officials proceed with this misguided plan, we request that you provide the maximum oversight possible to ensure that Ms. Peters does not improperly access ballots, voting systems, or sensitive information that could impact the rights and privacy of the over 100,000 registered voters in Shasta County in violation of…state or federal election law.”

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Fortinet on Tuesday revealed it will use Intel Foundry to fab its sixth-gen Security Processor (SP6), a nice win for Chipzilla's sputtering chipmaking biz. The chips feature dedicated accelerators designed specifically for the security and cryptographic operations required by modern hardware firewalls. The custom chips are one of Fortinet's defining features. Many cybersecurity hardware players build appliances around commodity hardware like x86 and Arm CPUs, but Fortinet prefers custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The two companies haven't said when the chips will enter production, much less what the SP6's speeds and feeds will entail, though we imagine it'll have a bit more pep than Fortinet's SP5 chips. The SP5 launched in 2023 and boasted support for layer 7 firewalling and IPsec VPN connectivity at speeds exceeding 30 Gbps. Throughput fell when advanced threat protection or SSL inspection was enabled, but Fortinet still claimed a speedy 4.3 Gbps and 3.3 Gbps, respectively. As you might have already figured out, Fortinet's SP line is designed primarily for smaller appliances like SD-WAN gateways, rather than larger datacenter-centric appliances built around its beefier NP and CP-series parts. While Intel couldn't offer much detail on the chip itself, we're told it will use the older Intel 4 process node rather than the leading-edge 18A process tech. Chipzilla also suggested Fortinet will draw on its experience in disaggregated semiconductor design and advanced packaging, which could mean a chiplet architecture with greater scalability. With so little detail, we can only speculate. Intel declined to say which technologies beyond Intel 4 the chip will use. The x86 giant also declined to comment on the availability of the product, noting only that "details regarding the Fortinet Security Processor 6 availability will be announced at a later date." While SP6 won't use the latest chipmaking tech, it will be built in an American fab by an American company, offering a level of supply chain security that remains difficult to find. If you want even remotely leading-edge silicon, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC are your only options. US-based production can still mean settling for a less advanced process, although TSMC's first Arizona fab has already begun churning out 4 nm silicon and Samsung aims to bring its new Texas plant online this year. Fortinet would not be the first to enlist Intel's manufacturing might for sensitive workloads. Under DARPA's HIVE program, the chipmaker built an eight-core, 528-thread processor with 1 TB/s silicon-photonics interconnects specifically to accelerate graph analytics workloads. But it doesn't stop at the DoD. Supply chain security is something Intel has leaned into as it has sought to reinvent itself from an integrated device manufacturer serving mainly itself, and occasionally the US government, into a full-fledged foundry ready to compete with Samsung and, ultimately, TSMC. In mid-2024, Uncle Sam awarded Intel $3 billion to establish a secure enclave for manufacturing chips for government agencies. Since then, the US government has taken a 9.9 percent stake in the American chip biz. ®

This blog will be referencing the ICS/OT Backdoors & Breaches expansion deck created by BHIS and Dragos. We will be reviewing the ICS-focused Initial Compromise cards that are used to simulate a cyber incident and suggest potential mitigations to what is presented.

The post ICS Hard Knocks: Mitigations to Scenarios Found in ICS/OT Backdoors & Breaches appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

by Austin Kaiser // Intern Hacking a satellite is not a new thing. Satellites have been around since 1957. The first satellite launched was called Sputnik 1 and was launched […]

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Raymond Felch // Preface: I began my exploration of reverse-engineering firmware a few weeks back (see “JTAG – Micro-Controller Debugging“), and although I made considerable progress finding and identifying the […]

The post How to Hack Hardware using UART appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..