Konnech CEO, Eugene Yu, was arrested today in Michigan in connection with “theft of personal data.” The alleged stolen data belonged to poll workers and was the subject of True The Vote’s “PIT” in Arizona last August, where Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips singled out the company.
Konnech builds software to manage the poll workers, poll locations, campaigns, assets, and supplies necessary to run elections in the United States, Canada, and Australia.
During the PIT in August, Phillips and Engelbrecht had alleged they were cooperating with the FBI in Michigan about data being sent overseas by this company. The investigation quickly started to turn on them after the FBI started to distance itself from the investigation.
Kanekoa The Great, a spectacular investigative journalist and blogger, reported about the findings of The Pit on September 8, 2022.
In January 2021, Phillips said that the cyber analyst he had been working with encountered an “oddity in some of the URLs” such as vote4la.com, vote4detroit.com, and vote4boston.com, which Konnech’s “PollChief” software application used to gather personally-identifying information about poll workers.
Using Binary Edge, a software product companies use to identify and assess the risk of cyber breaches, “We began to look at where do these URLs actually resolve to. We found that most of them resolve to one IP address and that IP address — the URL resolved in China,” Phillips said.
“What we also learned in our review, apps.konnech.com [.net], resolved into this same URL in China, meaning that the application itself was residing in China,” he continued.
“In Binary Edge, you can figure out what type of database they are using, their database port, and all the different services offered by ports in this particular application living in China. It turned out that not only did it live there, but they left the database open.”
This database “stored the personally identifying information of over a million Americans,” he emphasized.
Engelbrecht and Phillips decided that “this was a major national security risk” and immediately took the information to the FBI.
Here is the link to the LA County website.
The theft of data only impacted the election workers, according to the Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon. The LADA seized hard drives and other digital evidence from the Michigan software firm with the assistance of Meridian Township Police in MI. The LADA is seeking Yu’s extradition to Los Angeles.
TrueTheVote, the election integrity firm that produced the data and information used in 2000Mules, was spot on when they said they found our data was being shipped off to China:
“Konnech distributes and sells its proprietary PollChief software, which is an election worker management system that was utilized by the county in the last California election. The software assists with poll worker assignments, communications and payroll. PollChief requires that workers submit personal identifying information, which is retained by the Konnech.
Under its $2.9 million, five-year contract with the county, Konnech was supposed to securely maintain the data and that only United States citizens and permanent residents have access to it.
District Attorney investigators found that in contradiction to the contract, information was stored on servers in the People’s Republic of China.”
Maybe law enforcement can look into 2000Mules next!
