How to hack a Diebold voting machine

[lostexpectation]

its funny to see repukes defending electronic voting and some casting doubts on it cos the californian company was taken over by a Venezuelan one.

of course the venezuelan has a paper receipt trail, so still does democracy better then us on that count.

[zuton]

Princeton Study Exposes Diebold Flaws

<object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.fliggo.com/embed/FrvJDAUx"></param><param name="wmode" value="opaque"></param><embed src="http://www.fliggo.com/embed/FrvJDAUx" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="opaque" width="425" height="355"></embed></object><div>Princeton Study Exposes Diebold Flaws</div>



"Princeton tested an AccuVote-TS which it obtained from a private party. The experiements were designed to determine whether the machine could be hacked under "real election practices", realistic scenarios in the real world. Princeton found the machine vulnerable to a number of "extremely serious attacks" that "undermine undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces." In other words, DieBold machines can be hacked and most have been. Princeton points out that computer specialists are skeptical of Direct Recording Machines (DRE), essentially general purpose machines running specialized election software. The biggest flaw, according to Princeton, is that DREs are dependent upon the "correct and secure operation of complex software programs" In the real word, that simply does not happen. Ominously, DRE failures most likely go undetected."

Main Findings The main findings of the study were:

"1. Malicious software running on a single voting machine can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss. We have constructed demonstration software that carries out this vote-stealing attack.

2. Anyone who has physical access to a voting machine, or to a memory card that will later be inserted into a machine, can install said malicious software using a simple method that takes as little as one minute. In practice, poll workers and others often have unsupervised access to the machines.

....and most importantly...

3. AccuVote-TS machines are susceptible to voting-machine viruses - computer viruses that can spread malicious software automatically and invisibly from machine to machine during normal pre-and post-election activity. We have constructed a demonstration virus that spreads in this way, installing our demonstration vote-stealing program on every machine it infects. "

what more is there to say.?...