Undetectable media bots; teens’ climate lawsuit; war zone Ebola crisis, and more

it thrown out.

Why so many people may never recover from Hurricane Michael (Eleanor Goldberg, Huffington Post)
Most Americans don’t have enough money in the bank to afford even a minor emergency.

DOJ charges Russian national in $35M election influence plot (Derek B. Johnson, FCW)
In one of the first concrete examples of a foreign interference campaign targeting the midterm elections, the Department of Justice today announced a criminal complaint charging Russian national Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova with conspiracy to defraud the United States, overseeing financial operations for a multinational social media influence campaign tied to the Russian government.
According to the complaint, from 2014 to the present, Khusyaynova served as the paymaster for a campaign, dubbed Operation Lakhta, that was designed in part to enable interference “with U.S. political and electoral processes, including the 2018 elections.”
The conspiracy included the use of fictitious social media personas, pages and groups to target U.S. audiences around divisive political and social issues and “to advocate for the election or electoral defeat of particular candidates.” The group staged and promoted political rallies, bought social media analytics products and services as used third parties to buy advertisements on social media platforms. The group also coordinated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll factory that was the target of previous indictments by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation, as well as other companies like Concord Management, which have shown up in previous indictments.

Welcome to the first war zone Ebola crisis (Laurie Garrett, Foreign Policy)
The world thought it knew how to deal with Ebola outbreaks—but it’s never dealt with one like this before.

Report: People are crowdfunding to buy voter data off hacker forums (Zaid Shoorbajee, Cyberscoop)
Voter records from 19 states are for sale on underground hacker forums, according to research from Anomali and Intel 471 published Monday. The discovery highlights hackers’ ongoing interest in exploiting voter data — and certainly marks unauthorized use of the data — but the incident doesn’t necessarily represent a breach. While the records are being illicitly sold, they’re not necessarily illicitly obtained. In many states, basic voter information, like name, address and party affiliation are public records. However, there are varying restrictions around who is allowed to obtain them, sometimes being limited to journalists, researchers or political campaigns.

Despite planned upgrade, New Jersey voting machines remain “primitive and hackable” for 2018 midterms (James Nash, Governing)