U.S. Mid-Terms: Hackers Expose ‘Staggering’ Voter Machine Flaws
By BBC. Voting machines pose “serious risks” to US security, hackers are warning.
A report outlines major flaws in voting hardware, weeks before US mid-term elections.
One ballot machine, used in 23 US states, carries a cybersecurity flaw that was reported over a decade ago, the hackers claim. . .
In August, the Def Con conference in Las Vegas ran a “Voting Village”, where participants were encouraged to uncover flaws in US election infrastructure by hacking into various computer systems.
More than 30 voting machines and other pieces of equipment were made available to attendees of the conference, including the M650 electronic ballot scanner, which is currently used by 23 US states. (Read more from “U.S. Mid-Terms: Hackers Expose ‘Staggering’ Voter Machine Flaws” HERE)
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Voting Machines Are Still Absurdly Vulnerable to Attacks
By WIRED. WHILE RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE operations in the 2016 US presidential elections focused on misinformation and targeted hacking, officials have scrambled ever since to shore up the nation’s vulnerable election infrastructure. New research, though, shows they haven’t done nearly enough, particularly when it comes to voting machines.
The report details vulnerabilities in seven models of voting machines and vote counters, found during the DefCon security conference’s Voting Village event. All of the models are in active use around the US, and the vulnerabilities—from weak password protections to elaborate avenues for remote access—number in the dozens. The findings also connect to larger efforts to safeguard US elections, including initiatives to expand oversight of voting machine vendors and efforts to fund state and local election security upgrades.
“We didn’t discover a lot of new vulnerabilities,” says Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the organizers of the Voting Village, who has been analyzing voting machine security for more than 10 years. “What we discovered was vulnerabilities that we know about are easy to find, easy to reengineer, and have not been fixed over the course of more than a decade of knowing about them. And to me that is both the unsurprising and terribly disturbing lesson that came out of the Voting Village.” (Read more from “Voting Machines Are Still Absurdly Vulnerable to Attacks” HERE)
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