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Election system passwords mistakenly exposed on Colorado secretary of state’s website
Leak said not to constitute a security breach
Election system passwords mistakenly exposed on Colorado secretary of state's website • Colorado Newsline
Colorado voting equipment passwords were exposed when they were posted as part of a spreadsheet on the Colorado secretary of state's website.
coloradonewsline.com
I decided to post this story due to two reasons:
1. What a joke of a headline this is and it's par for the course.
2. I want to talk about the security of your personal Excel sheets you have on your PCs that are powered by Windows OS and built using Microsoft Office products. You will want to read below, particularly if your Excel sheet have personal info like bank details, a password list, financial records, or bookkeeping records made by you, OR ANY OF YOUR EMPLOYEES!
You don't have control over your employee's "mouse clicks", so read below.
Most all of you have experienced Microsoft Office Products locking up or failing over the years, or simply shutting down and opening the ubiquitous popup dialog asking if you "want to report this issue to Microsoft". I have all flags like this triggered in my Operating System to prompt me with this dialog. If you have automatically approved of these reports and you don't get these error warnings anymore, then you should definitely take note of what I'm fixing to tell ya. And also for those that DO click "Yes" and approve of reporting the issue to Microsoft, please take note of what you're reporting.
First, THE EXCEL OR WORD FILE THAT CREATED THE ERROR IS TRANSFERRED TO MICROSOFT in its entirety. Read that again.
Yep. If you have a an Excel sheet with passwords or other important data, you just sent your life and padlock information to a server run by a Microsoft employee. Same with any financial sheets, or bookkeeping records.
I had this issue occur within the year and clicked on the "more details" button in the dialog window. I don't know if it's named "more details" but it is worded very similar to this.
So, I decided to go look at what was being sent to Bill Gates and his staff. Lo-and-behold, it was the Microsoft Excel worksheet in it's entirety. Microsoft temporarily stores a "copy" of the original Excel file in a temporary directory on your root hard drive before it sends the file to their server. This temporary directory is typically the C:/ drive if you installed the OS in the normal fashion without special partitions.
In my case, I saw the file in the cluster of temp folders and attempted to manually delete it before it could be sent to Billy Boy. BUT, I COULDN'T DELETE IT!
This is because the dialog box was still open on my computer and I had not closed it down, nor approved of the error report to be sent to Microsoft. I have multiple monitors, so this is easy to do.
Every time I tried to delete the file, it would be deleted for about second and then it was replaced with a brand new copy with the same exact name. I tried deleting it over 20 times! Same shit. My only option was to close the dialog box by clicking the upper right "X" rather than ANY buttons in the dialog. I do not click on any "Cancel" or "Approval" buttons with any software I don't want doing things on my computer.
After closing the dialog box, I was then able to delete the temporary file and the temporary folder. I have no clue if it was sent to Microsoft though. I will probably get some third party software to monitor all my outgoing connections and networking traffic.
Needles to say, this really, really pissed me off.
So, I set out to shut-down Microsoft's prompts, nags and reporting over the next several hours. In fact it took me most of the day including online research.
I looked up the servers that Microsoft uses for it's products and businesses. This took quite a lot of time and you will need to go and do a bunch of searches to find them. I culled the lists so there were no duplicates and then you add these to your "hosts" file on your computer to block any outgoing messages from your computer to third parties. I will not go into how to do this as there are many tutorials online. If you don't know what a hosts file is and you have "hammed thumbs" on the keyboard, you should probably not edit this file. There is a specific way you need to do it and the syntax needs to be followed exactly. It is not hard, but for some folks it can be tedious. But, more importantly, you need to edit this file in a straight text editor. Do not use Word or other word processing software. Those are not straight text editors.
Next, I went into the Registry and blocked several settings related to Microsoft. And finally, I went into some of the control panels with Microsoft to shut them down there too. They word things backwards on some of these settings so that they will still work without you knowing it. Like saying "yes" means "no". So, do some research online to see what these preference settings in the panels mean if you don't know what you're doing, or you don't have a technical mind on how "coders" think. Often they are worded awkwardly on purpose. They don't want you to disable their hoops, so remember that.
It is highly important that you know what you're doing if you attempt any of the things I stated in the two preceding paragraphs. If you screw up the Registry, your system may not boot or operate correctly. If you block the wrong files in your host files, you can also shut some things down and also block the internet or network traffic on your computer so that you cannot search Google to find a way to bail you out of the problem you created. My best advice is to look-up credible websites for some tutorials as to how to accomplish some of these tasks. They are not hard to do, but they can be tedious and time consuming and you can't have typos.
But, I must say, the huge upside is that I no longer have the nagging Microsoft stuff and I don't have the daily nagging popup on the right of the lower task bar telling me what Microsoft wants me to read everyday. Likewise, I haven't had an automatic updates happen in quite awhile.
Be aware that I did this in Windows 10. It's my understanding that Windows 11 has cut back on some of the things you can do like I described above. Even more reason not to update to Win 11 if you haven't already.
I am going to shift back to Libra Office due to Mr. Gate's tactics with his operating system and his software. I have used it in the past and it has worked great for what I need.
Home | LibreOffice - Free and private office suite - Based on OpenOffice - Compatible with Microsoft
Free office suite – the evolution of OpenOffice. Compatible with Microsoft .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. Updated regularly, community powered.
www.libreoffice.org
Sorry for the long diatribe, but I'm dang certain there are folks in this forum that have important shit stored on an Excel sheet or Word file that has been sent to Microsoft without their knowledge.
DISCLAIMER: I cannot help bail you out of mess if you do something wrong. A lot of you folks are "fixers" in this forum and that could bite you in the ass here. Fixing something wrong on a computer can be a very time consuming task to correct. Editing the registry, bios, or any operating system files is prone for errors and there is a high probability of you doing something wrong. I would suggest writing down what you did on paper while you're doing it. It can be information overload and this is the only real way to keep track of things if you don't understand what you're doing. If you have a second computer, you might want to surf for solutions with that computer while working on the other one. This way, your internet history is still there in case you screw up the other computer and it won't boot or run properly. And finally, if you do edit the Registry, back it up before you attempt to modify it.
(Before anyone tells me about the password management software and online services to software, I know about these already and I'm not interested.)
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