For the last few years at Def Con, a massive security conference attended by many ethical hackers, the organizers have put on an event called the Voting Village. Here, hackers are invited to hack various types of voting machine used in the US. The idea is to test whether these machines are secure.
Hackers Invited to Crack Internet Voting
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Unfortunately, they are not. The hackers managed to compromise every single voting machine available at the 2019 event. The machines are available to buy on eBay, which makes it easy for hackers to practice accessing and subverting them.
Another concern was that many of the parts for voting machines come from outside of the US, making them vulnerable to foreign interference. For example, one machine the hackers tested contained hardware which pointed to a foreign IP address. The function of this connection wasn't clear, but it is concerning to have found it.
Another method the hackers used was accessing the BIOS of voting machines, as officials had not set BIOS passwords. This allowed hackers full access to all system settings. Even though the hardware did support Secureboot, which would stop the machine from running unknown code, election officials had not enabled it.
Yet another boot hack involved inserting a USB stick with a Linux operating system installed on it. When inserted, the voting machine could be made to boot from the USB. This gave hackers access to the machine and its data.
Another concern was that, on some of the voting machines, bloatware was not removed. This refers to pre-installed software which comes from the manufacturer and which may have security holes. These holes can allow hackers to access the machine. In one case, a voting machine was found to have apps installed like Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video!
Another issue is the use of smart cards generally. The machine allows the use of smart cards for voting officials to set up the machine and to collect data once voting is finished. But hackers can insert their own smart card. Even when the card is blank, hackers could use it to access logs of the machine. And this allows hackers to uncover vulnerabilities, and to see vote totals.
Computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, cited in the Princeton University study on the Diebold TS Electronic Voting Machine, testified that crackers from Iran and China attempted to break into an online voting system to be used by military and overseas in the November 2010 mid-term elections. He testified to D.C. City Council on October 8th, 2010.
It took computer hackers less than two hours to break into U.S. voting machines at the annual DefCon computer security conference, according to tech news site The Register. DefCon is an annual event that draws hackers from all over the world to Las Vegas to strut their stuff.
The AVS WINVote, made by Advanced Voting Solutions, passed necessary voting systems standards and has been used in Virginia and, until recently, in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. It used the easy-to-crack passwords of "admin," "abcde," and "shoup" to lock down its Windows administrator account, Wi-Fi network, and voting results database respectively, according to a scathing security review published Tuesday by the Virginia Information Technologies Agency. The agency conducted the audit after one Virginia precinct reported that some of the devices displayed errors that interfered with vote counting during last November's elections.
Hackers also quickly discovered that many of the voting machines had internet connections, which could allow hackers to break into machines remotely, the Washington Post reported. Motherboard recently reported that election security experts found that election systems used in 10 different states have connected to the internet over the last year, despite assurances from voting machine vendors that they are never connected to the internet and therefore cannot be hacked.
Adult hackers also took liberties with the machines. One hacker turned a voting machine into a jukebox able to play music and display animations. Another was able to program a voting machine into a de facto gaming console that played the popular computer game Doom.
After nearly an hour and a half, Carsten Schürmann, an associate professor with IT-University of Copenhagen, successfully cracked into a voting machine at Las Vegas' Defcon convention on Friday night, CNET reports.
The hacker was Carsten Schürmann, an associate professor with IT University of Copenhagen. He was one of the computer hackers invited to the Defcon convention in Las Vegas to test the security and integrity of common pieces of voting technology, many of which were purchased more than a decade ago and are rapidly becoming obsolete.
What experts are telling us, though, is that our voting machines are so insecure that all elections, whether at the national, state, or local level, are vulnerable to being attacked by hackers in other countries.
Jonathan Katz, Director of the Maryland Cybersecurity Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, observes that even if a system appears safe, voting online allows hackers to examine the system for points of vulnerability.
Since 2000, numerous computer and voting experts, including the National Science Foundation, have authored studies warning about the serious vulnerabilities of iVoting. Some of these studies cite unsuccessful internet voting systems that have been implemented in such countries as Estonia, France, and Norway.
So how do you infiltrate the company or state agency that programs the ballot design? You can infiltrate their computers, which are connected to the internet. Then you can spread malicious code to voting machines over a very large area. It creates a tremendously concentrated target for attack.
Until now, no final report on such tests has been published on the TSE website (www.tse.jus.br). Other sources published possible failures, such as problems found in the ballot box with audio, designed for visually impaired voters. According to experts invited by the TSE, it is possible to others around the booth to identify the vote of the visually impaired voter through the sound emitted by voting Urn. Another serious flaw found was the possibility of change in the number of votes allocated to a particular candidate after the polls are closed.
Alex Halderman, professor of Computer Science at UM has clarified his earlier remarks about the integrity of the Wisconsin election: in a nutshell: voting machine security sucks, hackers played an unprecedented role in this election.
We already knew that Russians attempted to compromise the US election system in 2016; in July, we found out that the company responsible for manufacturing the majority of voting machines used in the US sold systems that could connect to the internet, making them vulnerable to hacking.
Voting machines that record votes and tally them are run on software that is vulnerable to cyberintrusions.24 Well-resourced hackers, whether funded by foreign governments or criminal syndicates, have the access, ability, and motivation to infect computerized voting machines and tallying systems across America. This can occur even if the machines are not connected to the internet. Attackers, for example, can deploy software such as Stuxnet and Brutal Kangaroo to target offline voting machines.25 2ff7e9595c
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