Rapid advances in the development of cyberweapons and malicious software mean that electronic-voting machines used in the 2012 election could be hacked, potentially tipping the presidential election or a number of other races.<\/p>\n
Since the machines are not connected to the Internet, any hack would not be a matter of someone sneaking through cyberspace to change ballots. Rather, the concern is that an individual hacker, a partisan group, or even a nation state could infect voting machines by gaining physical access to them or by targeting the companies that service them.<\/p>\n
The 2010 discovery of the Stuxnet cyberweapon, which used a thumb drive to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and spread among its computers, illustrated how one type of attack could work. Most at risk are paperless e-voting machines, which don\u2019t print out any record of votes, meaning the electronically stored results could be altered without anyone knowing they had been changed.<\/p>\n
In a tight election, the result could be the difference between winning and losing. A Monitor analysis shows that four swing states \u2013 Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado, and Florida \u2013 rely to varying degrees on paperless machines.<\/p>\n
“The risk of cyber manipulation of these machines is quite real,” says Barbara Simons, a computer researcher and author of “Broken Ballots,” a book documenting e-voting vulnerabilities. “Most people don’t understand that these computer-based voting machines can have software bugs or even election-rigging malicious software in them.”<\/p>\n
There are plenty of software vulnerabilities to exploit, says Matt Blaze, a computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In 2007, he was on a team investigating touch-screen and other voting systems for California and Ohio. The resulting study concluded “virtually every important software security mechanism is vulnerable.”<\/p>\n
The paperless machines, however, stand out as particularly vulnerable.<\/p>\n
“If there’s no paper trail, you can have the corrupted software display on the voting-machine screen whatever you want to display \u2013 and then after the voter leaves, record something completely different inside,” says Richard Kemmerer, a computer scientist who heads the University of California, Santa Barbara, Computer Security Group.<\/p>\n
From the The Christian Science Monitor (http:\/\/s.tt\/1r7Gh)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rapid advances in the development of cyberweapons and malicious software mean that electronic-voting machines used in the 2012 election could be hacked, potentially tipping the presidential election or a number of other races. Since the machines are not connected to … Continue reading