Swedes Cast Write-In Votes for SQL Injection, Donald Duck
An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish elections were held recently (the third Sunday of September to be exact) and it seems that a few people tried to interfere with the election by voting for parties which were in effect named to be SQL injection attacks or similar. Clever stuff! Little Bobby Tables in real life."
That wasn't the only oddity of the election; reader MZeroOne writes: "The Swedish Election Authority published the results of last Sunday's general election and even though the current prime minister retained power, the candidate who got the most individual handwritten votes was Disney's Donald Duck." Maybe the existence of the Hard Alcohol Party (237 votes) helps explain why the Pirate Party didn't have a better showing.
The Donald Duck party is an all time favourite joke vote in Sweden, but it is actually a registered party. They promise free alcohol and wider sidewalks. They don't have a budget for voting slips, but write-in votes are valid (if spelt correctly). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck_Party
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Seriously? What is this, 1997? Who still writes code vulnerable to those?
Seriously, you don't even want to know.
Over my past two jobs, all but one of the most important enterprise systems we used had zero protection from attacks like these. Talkin' accounting, inventory, POS - Even the Borg of ERP packages, MS Dynamics, still chokes on merely having apostrophes in most fields.
And from what I've seen of banking systems that I've had to interface with, I'd keep my money under my bed - Except many of them haven't quite caught up to all this fancy "new" SQL tech. Nice safe 60s era COBOL code - And yes, they still use two digit years, because after all, we have another 90 years before the Y2K fixes will break.
Meanwhile, the neo-Nazi Sweden Democrats won 5.7% of the vote, 20 seats, giving them the balance of power.
Thanks for the joke votes. Your apathy just gave actual Nazis a say in parliament.
There are banks, hospitals, utilities and other institutions that don't take kindly to change. These institutions have ancient (as in I ran across a piece of code that was written when I was in diapers) legacy systems running key functionality that many people's everyday lives depend on. If you ever had to take a look at any of the code for these legacy systems it would frighten you, but what is more frightening is that most of these institutions have an "if it's not broken don't fix it" mentality so don't expect modern security issues to be addressed in a lot of these legacy systems anytime soon.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
My home address has an apostrophe in the house name, and every so often this breaks an internet site (usually online shopping). When it does work, most just remove the "nasty" character.