Pennsylvania's Voting Machines Are Running Windows XP (cbsnews.com)

Slashdot reader rmurph04 writes: As reported by CBS News, the battleground state of Pennsylvania might as well have a target on its back as Election Day nears, the cybersecurity company Carbon Black warned in a new report released Thursday. Across the state, most Pennsylvania counties use particularly high-risk electronic voting machines that leave behind zero paper trails, which could be useful to audit the integrity of votes cast. In addition, many of these machines -- called "direct-recording electronic" machines -- are running on severely outdated operating systems like Windows XP, which has not been patched by Microsoft since 2014.

According to the survey more than one in five registered U.S. voters may stay home on Election Day because of fears about cybersecurity and vote tampering. Respondents believe a U.S. insider threat poses the most risk (28%), followed by Russian hackers (17%) and then the candidates themselves (15%).

Comments

Desktop XP or XP POS

[lister king of smeg]

Are they running the POS or embeded that are still getting updates? Just saying XP isn't exactly helpful.

Stay at home, they may try rigging the election

[thegarbz]

What a dumb thought process. Someone may try rig the election so I'm not going to bother going to vote? Who's brain works like this?

Re:Stay at home, they may try rigging the election

[Anonymous Coward]

What a dumb thought process. ... Who's brain works like this?

The same idiots who gave us a choice between Ms. repulsive and Mr. truly scary.

Re:XP, or Windows Embedded Standard 2009?

[BarbaraHudson]

Microsoft is supporting it to 2019. People have reported, and Microsoft has confimed ta registry hack that lets regular XP and XP Professional also get support by pretending to be Windows Embedded Stardard 2009.

What's the threat model?

[Chelloveck]

Unpatched XP? So what? What's the threat model? Are these things online? I'd be worried about the latest OS running today's patch set online. Are they worried about tampering by election officials? Physical access is access. Again, the latest patches won't help. What threat do they think will be thwarted by current software?

Not a problem

[rsilvergun]

I vote early. If you can't vote early in your state it's because somebody doesn't want you to. Let that thought sink in for a moment.

They sure don't want me to vote in Texas

[shanen]

It's possible I'll get to vote anyway, but they rejected my ballot application the first time with several BS reasons (selected from a long list on the rejection form). Over the last few elections, it has been getting harder and harder to vote, and this latest voter-ID bogosity makes it much more difficult. And stupid.

The hilarious part is that my vote had already been rendered meaningless by the partisan gerrymandering and double-gerrymandering. My so-called Representative is such a worthless tool that they had to rejigger his district to keep it "safe". They are running out of room in the sacrificial districts where they pack in and waste the Democratic votes. They can't draw the district boundaries house by house! Or can they?

I sure hope it's worse than that from the dictators' perspective. The so-called Republicans (really former Dixiecrats "betrayed" by LBJ) have been driving Texas to the bottom so hard and making the state so cheap that a lot of damn Yankees have moved south. Maybe they are about to flip the state back to the Dems, even though the polls have trouble tracking and accounting for first-time-in-district voters. No evidence, but "some people are saying", as the Donald says.

(Also hurts them that Trump is killing the Hispanic vote. This latest insane TwitterWar is NOT the temperament of a potentially great president. If she would have just given him the damn blowjob as payback for maker her a winner, then none of this would have happened!)

Hyperbole and Strawmen....

[Lumpy]

The voting machines are NOT connected to the internet. They are also running EMBEDDED XP not desktop XP. No they can not be infected easily unless someone has physical access... and at that point every OS on the planet is easily cracked wide open if the attacker has their hands on the device.