[Corporations] How to (Very Easily) Hack an Election, NYT editorial

[kster]

NOTE THE DATE..................

The New York Times January 31, 2004

TODAY'S EDITORIALS

How to Hack an Election

Concerned citizens have been warning that new electronic voting
technology being rolled out nationwide can be used to steal
elections. Now there is proof. When the State of Maryland hired a
computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers
had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the
machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows
convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting,
starting with voter-verified paper trails.

When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines,
there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new
touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes
cast, were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged
attack on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try
to foil the safeguards and interfere with an election.

They were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they
reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote
multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting
terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw
and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote
location.

Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist,
but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem
almost too bad to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have
identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by
any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making
duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved
unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in "approximately
10 seconds."



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