{"id":13966,"date":"2016-04-02T05:42:05","date_gmt":"2016-04-02T10:42:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hcstx.org\/?p=13966"},"modified":"2016-04-02T05:42:05","modified_gmt":"2016-04-02T10:42:05","slug":"cyber-news-how-to-hack-an-election","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/2016\/04\/02\/cyber-news-how-to-hack-an-election\/","title":{"rendered":"Cyber-News: How To Hack An Election"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bloom\"<\/p>\n

Andr\u00e9s Sep\u00falveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He tells his story for the first time.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

It was just before midnight when Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico<\/a>. Pe\u00f1a Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to power on that night in July\u00a02012, Pe\u00f1a Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.<\/p>\n

Two thousand miles away, in an apartment in Bogot\u00e1\u2019s upscale Chic\u00f3 Navarra neighborhood, Andr\u00e9s Sep\u00falveda sat before six computer screens. Sep\u00falveda is Colombian, bricklike, with a shaved head, goatee, and a tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his head. On his nape are the words \u201c<\/head>\u201d and \u201c<body>\u201d stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live feed of Pe\u00f1a Nieto\u2019s victory party, waiting for an official declaration of the results.<\/p>\n

When Pe\u00f1a Nieto won, Sep\u00falveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.<\/p>\n

<\/figure>\n

For eight years, Sep\u00falveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Pe\u00f1a Nieto job was by far his most complex. He led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Pe\u00f1a Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, eke out a victory. On that July night, he cracked bottle after bottle of Col\u00f3n Negra beer in celebration. As usual on election night, he was alone.<\/p>\n

Read the Remainder at Bloomberg<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andr\u00e9s Sep\u00falveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He tells his story for the first time. It was just before midnight when Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto declared victory as the newly elected president of Mexico. Pe\u00f1a Nieto was a lawyer and a millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[74,5653,1317,4912,4126],"tags":[10814,4757,10815,10816,10817,10818],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13966"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13966\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetacticalhermit.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}