Dominion is Panicking in Pennsylvania Because Their Machines Likely Weren’t Properly ‘Hardened’ and Shouldn’t Have Ever Been Put in Use

 

Fulton County, Pennsylvania has every right to investigate its voting machines.  The voting machine company, Dominion, is fighting against this investigation.  

We reported yesterday that Dominion was fighting against the inspection of their voting machines in Fulton County, Pennsylvania.

Dominion claims that the investigators looking into their voting machines for Fulton County will damage or destroy their machines when they make forensic copies of their computers.  This is simply not true.  But it is true that it is harmful to your case to lie to a judge. 

Dominion’s remedy for their complaint is to suggest that the only companies to investigate their machines should be related to EAC-approved or cyber-approved companies as listed in their complaint.

The problem that Dominion has is not that their machines will be mishandled or damaged as a result of thorough inspections by independent professionals.  Rather. Dominion must be concerned that the court and the County will find out that their machines should not have been certified for use. 

The reason this may be the case is because the machines may not have gone through the proper ‘hardening’ process.  According to the enterprise networking planet:

System hardening is the process that secures computing systems by reducing the attack surface to make them hack-proof. It consists of a set of tools and methodologies that removes the non-essential services, thus minimizing the security risks to your system as much as possible.

When Dominion machines are shipped to the various locations where they are used they need to go through the ‘system hardening’ process.   Any superfluous games, emails, etc. need to be removed from the machines.  The guidelines for hardening should be followed and procedures should take place to set up the machines properly.

The client and the machine company should have a checklist that users would go through to address password controls, etc. and the hardening checklist should be signed off on and verified.  After the hardening process is complete and the machines are signed off on they should then be put in use, but not before.

It appears clear that the Dominion machines have not been hardened.  If they were, they would not have software like SQL server on them.  We found this in multiple locations in 2021.

Since these machines contained SQL Server and God only knows what else, they were not hardened.  Since the Dominion machines were not hardened they should not have been put in production in the first place.

These facts are why Dominion is fighting so hard to prevent thorough reviews of their machines.

The Dominion machines should never have been put in use and that places Dominion in a terrible situation with tremendous liabilities related to the numerous machines put in production across the country.