US Voting Machines Cracked In 90 Minutes At DEFCON (thehill.com)

An anonymous reader quotes The Hill: Hackers at at a competition in Las Vegas were able to successfully breach the software of U.S. voting machines in just 90 minutes on Friday, illuminating glaring security deficiencies in America's election infrastructure. Tech minds at the annual "DEF CON" in Las Vegas were given physical voting machines and remote access, with the instructions of gaining access to the software. According to a Register report, within minutes, hackers exposed glaring physical and software vulnerabilities across multiple U.S. voting machine companies' products. Some devices were found to have physical ports that could be used to attach devices containing malicious software. Others had insecure Wi-Fi connections, or were running outdated software with security vulnerabilities like Windows XP.
Though some of the machines were out of date, they were all from "major U.S. voting machine companies" like Diebold Nixorf, Sequoia Voting Systems, and WinVote -- and were purchased on eBay or at government auctions. One of the machines apparently still had voter registration data stored in plain text in an SQLite database from a 2008 election, according to event's official Twitter feed.

By Saturday night they were tweeting video of a WinVote machine playing Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up."

Comments

Re:Not being used any more

[fustakrakich]

Problem is that they replaced them with other machines instead of pen and paper.

Sometimes an old system is best

[elrous0]

Physical ballots are still the best way to do it. The added confidence and security is WELL worth it.

Re:Not being used any more

[JaredOfEuropa]

still have the actual vote to recount.

That's ridiculous. You get a quick readout from the machine, hopefully accurate enough to announce a preliminary vote count, but by now it should be abundantly clear that the paper ballots should be considered the actual result. Counting the paper ballots is not a "recount", it is the actual count. The only advantage this type of machine offers is the paper trail, but if you don't use it and do a full recount, then what use is that trail?

Re:Oregon Vote By Mail - Hands Down The Best Syste

[LynnwoodRooster]

Until you get that one house with 83 ballots - all with different names - mailed to it. Or you get those Democratic elected officials "finding" more votes after the election and you count them anyway, overturning a Gubernatorial election... And of course - no way to prove who actually cast the ballot because there is ZERO identification required (you know, like Canada , Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and most of the rest of the world requires).