Monday, August 1, 2016

Russian hackers and electronic voting machines

I've said that I'm skeptical as to whether the Russians actually hacked the DNC email server.  However, there's no question at all whether they could have.  As to Hillary's home brew server, everyone seems to be operating from the starting assumption that they read all her email.  This is much more likely than not.

There's also no question that the biggest story is whether the use of electronic voting machines would let the Russians (or someone else) rig an election:
Over the years, more and more states have moved to electronic voting machines and have flirted with Internet voting. These systems are insecure and vulnerable to attack.
But while computer security experts like me have sounded the alarm for many years, states have largely ignored the threat, and the machine manufacturers have thrown up enough obfuscating babble that election officials are largely mollified.
We no longer have time for that. We must ignore the machine manufacturers’ spurious claims of security, create tiger teams to test the machines’ and systems’ resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses and take them offline if we can’t guarantee their security online.
The cynic in me thinks that the two political parties loved electronic voting machines because they saw the opportunity to do industrial scale voter fraud.  Certainly there was a rush to deploy these after the 2000 election.  Of course, security was not an after thought - 15 years later we're still dealing with what was well known at the time.

And now everyone is worried about the Russians rigging an election?  Good grief.

Bring back paper ballots.  You need physical access to tamper with them, so you can't do it from Minsk ...

3 comments:

Old NFO said...

I have no doubt there WILL be issues in November... sigh

Divemedic said...

The way to force the issue would be for some hacker to make some ridiculous person the winner of the next election, but then again, that's bound to happen anyway.

matism said...

I am far less concerned about the Russians hacking, than I am about the Democrats and Rove Republicans doing so. It matters not who votes. All that matters is who COUNTS the votes. And if you believe that supervisors of elections in this country are above turning in results that are totally at odds with what's on the machines, well...