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Security Firm Shows How To Hack a US Voting Machine (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: "Three days before the US Presidential Election takes place, California-based security firm Cylance showed the world how easy it is to hack one of the many [electronic] voting machine models that will be deployed at voting stations across the US on Election Day." Bleeping Computer reports that "The machine that Cylance researchers chose for their test was the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1, one of the most popular models... The technique researchers created modifies the Public Counter, but also the Protective Counter, which is a backup mechanism that acts as a redundant verification system to ensure the first vote results are valid." Physical access is needed to hack the machine, but the hack takes a short time to perform.
FBI Director James Comey said in September that America's voting machines would be hard to compromise because they're not connect to the internet, but these researchers simply used a PCMCIA card to reflash the machine's firmware. Comey also made the reassuring point that it's hard to "hack into" America's voting system because "it's so clunky and dispersed. It's Mary and Fred putting a machine under the basketball hoop at the gym."
FBI Director James Comey said in September that America's voting machines would be hard to compromise because they're not connect to the internet, but these researchers simply used a PCMCIA card to reflash the machine's firmware. Comey also made the reassuring point that it's hard to "hack into" America's voting system because "it's so clunky and dispersed. It's Mary and Fred putting a machine under the basketball hoop at the gym."
Is wireless access to the machines. A machine does not have to be connected to the internet to be hacked remotely. How many of these machines have wireless cards? Then, all a hacker (or insider) needs to do is pull up to the voting location with a laptop that has a wireless connection and all the right passwords and . . . . code adjusted! There are reports of this happening in Virginia when Mitt Romney went up against Ron Paul in 2012. It was a very close election at one precinct that was going up and down between the two candidates up to a certain point. Then all of the sudden near noontime, it quit going up and down but flat-lined to a 60/40 Romney/Paul split for the rest of the day. How likely is that?
Whoever your candidate is, do you really want that kind of voting situation - where you can never be sure who really won? This is what the Bush push for "accurate electronic voting machines," was all about. They no longer wanted it to be possible for a non-insider to be able to win a major or critical election. I suspect if Gore had won, he would have pushed for the same thing. Most Republican and Democrat candidates at the top are usually on the same team, anyway.
This woman won 6 of 6 coin tosses to beat Bernie in Iowa.
That is incorrect information that was pushed by the media in initial frenzy of reporting, but completely debunked. Here's the Iowa Register story, which I would the most accurate source for information in Iowa: http://www.desmoinesregister.c...
According to the Register, the report of Hillary winning six coin flips came from social media. Of the seven coin flips to break ties that were actually officially reported through the voting app, Sanders won six, and Clinton one. http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/02/...
Here's a more interesting question: since Clinton did not in fact win a majority of coin tosses, what are the statistical chances that coin flips that happened to get reported in on social media would suggest that she did?
Another link: http://www.theatlantic.com/pol...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com