Author: Jayden Arquelada

With the 2019 Federal Election having recently taken place, the idea of strategic voting was observed. Strategic voting is basically where someone may vote for a candidate whom they may not necessarily want to win, but is a better option that someone else winning. Someone may strategically choose to vote, if they believe their candidate does not have a chance of winning. For example, take three parties Conservatives, Liberals, and the Green Party. If someone wanted the Green party to win, but the Green party did not have a high chance of winning, that person may instead choose to vote for Liberals for example, if they did not want the conservatives to win. While strategic voting may not have been the driving force for all voter’s decisions, it is an interesting idea to take a look at applied on a large scale, such as voting.

Voter’s who strategically voted, instead of simply voting for the candidate they wanted to win without thinking about other possible options, demonstrate the idea of game theory. Based on the article, Liberals benefited the most from strategic voting, and as such a sample scenario with be outlined where Liberals benefit from strategic voting.

For example, say we Conservatives have 50% support, Liberals have 49% support, and Green Party has 1% support. Without strategic voting and assuming every voter votes for the party they support, conservatives will win since they have the most support. However, imagine green supporters realize their party will not win, and strategically vote instead. Assume in this example, the voter would prefer the Liberal party to win over Conservatives.

We can assign numbers to represent how happy a voter will be if a party is elected.
Voter 1 (Supports Green party) -> Conservative = -5, Liberal = 0, Green = +5
Voter 2 (Supports Conservatives) -> Conservative = +5, Liberal = -5, Green = 0
Furthermore, assume that the background colour of the box represents the party who wins (Blue being Conservative and Red being Liberals). We can then define the game as such:

As we can see, a Conservative supporter will vote conservative, as their party does have a good chance of winning and therefore their vote will help conservatives win. However, a green party supporter who prefers Liberal over Conservative, may realize that voting Liberal instead of Green will be the better option. This is because as Green does not have a high chance of winning, and Liberal winning would be preferred over Conservatives winning.

Obviously the example outlined above, does not outline every possible scenario as there are other parties to consider, and the 2 voters can support different parties. Furthermore, not everyone will strategically vote. However, this does serve to outline how Game Theory applies to strategic voters, even if they may not be aware of it themselves.

References
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/election-2019/liberals-benefited-most-from-strategic-voting-poll-of-late-deciding-voters-finds
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poll-strategic-voting-1.5339692

Recently, a new malware known as Nodersok/Divergent, surfaced. While the steps this malware takes to infect a system are an interesting topic to look into, that will not be the focus of this post. Rather we will look at what an infected system can do, within the network it is connected to.

The malware allows malicious JavaScript code to run and execute under the valid program Node.exe. The payload of the malware contains basic functions, which turns the infected machine into a proxy, accessible through a remote machine controlled by the attacker. While this does not give the attacker direct access to other machines on the network, there is still a breach within the infected PC’s network. An attacker can for example, use that machine as part of other malicious activities. Since the requests are being proxied through the infected machines, they may not necessarily be traced back to the attacker, but rather from the infected PC’s. 

While the malware itself, turns machines into proxies, it is interesting to think about what security threats this may pose on its network, especially if this malware were to evolve. For example, take a machine that sits within an isolated network: or in terms of graphs, an isolated, disconnected SCC. Machines would only be accessible from other machines on the network. However, as soon as one machine becomes infected, it’s possible that the attacker now has access to information on other machines, as requests would come from the infected machine. 

This leads to an interesting idea of how networks should be set up, in order to protect against threats such as this. For example, is it important and necessary to have all the machines in one SCC, or can some parts be even more isolated? If communication channels between the machines in the network are two-way (such as in an undirected graph), a possible solution could be to have one way communications between machines, similar to a directed graphs, in order to restrict the way machines can communicate. All in all, security breaches from malware related to networking requests, can pose a large threat, and should be taken into account when designing how machines are connected within a network.

References
https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2019/09/26/bring-your-own-lolbin-multi-stage-fileless-nodersok-campaign-delivers-rare-node-js-based-malware/