Posted on 09/30/2011 1:36:03 AM PDT by Watchdog85
Voting stations will need to take extra precautions with the election of 2012 as a national laboratory has shown just how easy it can be to hack into an electronic voting booth.
In fact, Salon reports that all it really takes is about $10.50 and an 8th grade science education. The Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory, a lab run through the Department of Energy, was able to demonstrate three simple “man in the middle attacks” on touchscreen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems, like Diebold voting machines and Sequoia Voting Systems.
In this hack, the voter still casts their vote and approves it as correct, but the information is intercepted by the hacker through the device they installed, which Salon notes didn’t require any special soldering. In terms of getting inside the machine to place the device, it’s as easy as “picking the rudimentary lock,” according to Salon.
As the researchers say, voting officials should shift their focus from just cyber attacks to those that are a bit more straightforward. Salon continues:
Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results. But critics like California Secretary of State Debra Bowen have pointed out that attempts at “security by obscurity” largely ignore the most immediate threat, which comes from election insiders who have regular access to the e-voting systems, as well as those who may gain physical access to machines that were not designed with security safeguards in mind.
This is a fundamentally very powerful attack and we believe that voting officials should become aware of this and stop focusing strictly on cyber [attacks],” says Vulnerability Assessment Team member John Warner. “There’s a very large physical protection component of the voting machine that needs to be addressed.”
CNET reports on the potential for safeguarding these machines:
While it would be relatively easy to make this type of attack more difficult to do by making modifications to the voting machine, stopping the attack cold would require more effort and a “careful examination of the security protocols used,” he said.
Johnston and his team did the research on their own time, as “a kind of Saturday afternoon project,” he said. “There’s not a lot of funding out there to study voting machine problems.”
Salon reports that Sean Flaherty, a policy analyst for VerifiedVoting.org as saying that about a third of voters will use a machine similar to the ones Argonne tested.
ZDNet notes controversy over the potential hackability for these types of voting machines a few years ago and the conflict of interest that arose during the George W. Bush administration since Diebold had been one of Bush’s top fundraisers. ZDNet continues with the fact that Diebold changed its name to Premier Election Solutions, which is now owned by Election Systems & Software. In 2008, CNET reported some states reverting back to paper voting systems due to hacking concerns.
I’m all for technology.
But votes need to be on paper with a paper trail.
That’s why the left isn’t worried about 2012 as I stated a couple of years ago, “We have already had or last free election”.
Maybe I don’t have an 8th grade edumakashun, but wouldn’t you need either an I/O plug, or a wireless card, built into the voting machine to hack it???? Sounds verrry verrry fishy to me, kinda like setting up an excuse for a verrry large loss for the commies.... doesn’t make sense, and as Judge Judy says, if it doesn’t make sense, then it isn’t true....
Biggest BS story of the month.
No-one’s hacking in. You need physical access to the machine before and after the vote, time to install and extract it with the machine dismantled, and no-one to detect it in between. It’d be a lot easier to show up with a truck full of punch cards.
No, it’s not a software hack. It’s a hardware hack. They’re actually talking about building a machine that doesn’t work right.
The funny part of this is the mention of an 8th grade education......given that kids are graduating from high school and entering college like an assembly line gone astray, most of these kids can not even do basic Math 095 computations let alone write a proper paragraph......but yeah, let’s continue to hype the idiotic mention that anyone with an “8th grade education” can do such and such.... =.=
“the attacker takes an integrated circuit piece that contains the logic and the processor needed to tamper with the voting results”
The source code (Also one would need to know what langauge it’s written in) and the EXPENSIVE software that would be needed to complete this task and I’m pretty sure that’s not easily availabe to an 8th grader.
I would agree with you on that one. Proprietary code is no less prone to being buggy than open-source - in fact it may be more prone to being buggy - and serious hackers/crackers have the tools to render proprietary code more or less open-source as far as they are concerned, so using an open-source solution that has been rigorously tested by all and sundry who want to take a shot at it is more likely to be safer, all things considered, than some niche piece of proprietary code which, because it isn’t going to be a widely-sold product, will not get a huge amount of development or testing resources thrown at it.
You mean like the close and unsupervised access as is common corrupt democrat precincts? Yeah, that's nothing to worry about.
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