I’ve already discussed the insanity of tying all those Maricopa County systems together, and how — if the sheriff is correct about what would be exposed simply by looking at routers — the election system is already compromised. But look a little closer at Penzone’s statement:
We are talking about confidential, sensitive and highly-classified law enforcement data and equipment that will be permanently compromised.
Not “Looking at the routers would reveal database server addresses.” He is saying that looking at the routers would reveal the actual data. Think about that. I see three options.
1. He is lying.
2. He believed someone else’s lie.
3. The data is on the routers.
#3 is scary. Routers log connections, packet counts, connection attempts, firewall data. But they don’t normally log packet content, the actual data. So the data the sheriff says would be exposed shouldn’t be there.
But… If they’ve configured the routers for packet sniffing and logging, then yes; it would. But remember, this is a county wide network.
Bill payments, payroll data including names and bank routing and account numbers, HIPAA-protected Medicare/Medicaid patient data, emails, chat messages…
…anything sent over the county wide network.
I imagine blackhats around the world are probing the hell out of maricopa.gov by now, hoping to get in and steal — or hold for ransom — all the great data the sheriff claims is there, sitting on routers, all nicely collected for them. Instead of getting into the network, then probing a bunch of separate servers, they just need to attack a router.
Of course, they’ll mostly just be disappointed if the sheriff was lying or misled. But they’ll want to check.
All because Sheriff Penzone told them the data is there.
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