7 Senate Democrats Urge Obama To Declassify Information About Russia Meddling In US Election

[KatyBR]

54. These aren't excuses - check out malware called the Stuxnet worm

source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/11/e-voting-machines-need-paper-audits-be-trustworthy

There is precedent for hackers attempting to influence elections by tampering with voting infrastructure: Ukraine's 2014 election came under attack from pro-Russian hackers, and this spring Bloomberg reported on how a team of hackers targeted elections throughout Latin America. There was also plenty of hacking related to the 2016 US election, with two separate major dumps of political emails and several reports of attempted attacks on election systems. These attacks tell us that hacking groups, some of whom may be nation states, were particularly interested in affecting this election's outcome.

Of course, there is good reason to believe US voting machines are vulnerable; for years, EFF along with hundreds of security experts nationwide and even worldwide sounded the alarm about the risk posed by insecure voting machines. EFF handled many cases arising from problems with the machines. In 2004, California decertified many voting machines due to serious security flaws.

Most e-voting machines are not connected to the Internet, but disconnection isn't a sufficient defense against hacking. Malware can be engineered to cross a so-called air gap by riding on removable storage media like thumb drives and SD cards. The Stuxnet worm is a remarkable example of this in action. It was designed to infect internet-connected workstations and then copy itself over whenever a thumb drive was plugged into those workstations. Once an infected thumb drive was plugged into an air-gapped system, the worm would install itself and begin its work. The voting machines used in America are updated using removable storage that is at some point plugged into a regular computer in a government office. Hackers need only compromise that computer, and they can use that toehold to copy a Stuxnet-like worm onto all removable storage that comes into contact with it and matches a certain profile. Once plugged into a voting machine, that worm could alter the machine's software to subtly change the vote. A particularly well-written worm would automatically reverse those changes after the election to cover its tracks.

Wired Magazine story on World's first Digital Warfare:https://www.wired.com/2014/11/countdown-to-zero-day-stuxnet/