Security Expert Jailed For Reporting Vulnerabilities In Lee County, FL Elections (theregister.co.uk)

rootmon writes: Information Security Professional David Levin was arrested 3 months after reporting un-patched SQL injection vulnerabilities in the Lee County, Florida Elections Office run by Sharon Harrington, the Lee County Supervisor of Elections. Harrington's office has been in the news before for voting systems problems (for example in during the 2012 election, 35 districts in Lee County had to remain open 3 hours past the closing of polls due to long lines and equipment issues, wasting $800,000 to $1.6 million of taxpayer money on incompatible iPads for which her office is facing an audit. Rather than fixing the issues in their systems, they chose to charge the whistleblower with three third-degree felonies. The News Press also has several related interviews.

Comments

White Hat

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope the courts recognize that white hats are the good guys. I hope that paves the way for Levin (and EFF) to sue Lee County and Harrington for damages. And I hope that discourages other politicians from lashing out at the good guys.

Re:White Hat

[dgatwood]

Ha, ha. You still think those vulnerabilities were accidents.

IMO, it seems far more likely that the SQL injection holes were deliberate. After all, parameterized SQL queries have been the norm for at least eight or ten years, which means that for this to be accidental, either the software would have to be as old as Windows Vista or the developers would have to be so grossly incompetent that they would never be able to hold down a job writing database software for more than a week or two.

The whole "never attribute to malice" thing applies only when it can be plausibly attributed to incompetence. SQL injections in an election system in 2016 fall so far on the other side of that line that you can't even see the line from there.

With that said, in the unlikely event that I'm wrong, and that it really was caused by a grossly incompetent vendor, I expect to see that vendor added to a government blacklist and become immediately ineligible for any government contracts going forward. I also expect to see the software in question thrown away and paper ballots used until such time as a suitable replacement can be found. There's no excuse for allowing software that doesn't even meet 2010-era standards to be used for running elections in 2016. None whatsoever.

Government willfully ignorant of their own laws

[randomErr]

I wish best for this guy. He did what was right and now faces several felonies. I hope this gets thrown out and he can files a big fat civil lawsuit at the count. He has his felony charges published all over the news and in postings. He'll never be able to get top secret clearance. Any potential employer will Google this guy and may consider him to be too hot to handle.

Re:Lesson be learned

[HornWumpus]

Next time make the reported results so preposterous it's obvious that shenanigans are involved.

Make 'Vermin Supreme' get 110% of the votes. Give the mainstream candidates large enough negative vote counts to give the national popular vote to 'Vermin Supreme'.

Until someone does this, to a system directly feeding data to the news networks, the system will continue to be reported as 'secure and working as designed'.