Tourists amble along the sweltering boulevard, lined with giant hotels, neon signs and gaudy architecture. “Even where there are paper ballots, most ballots haven’t been checked to see if there was any hacking or intrusion, so even if security people didn’t see any outside hacking occurring on Election Day, things could have been attacked earlier.It is 41C on the Las Vegas strip. “Nobody’s done a really thorough examination,” Simons said. While numerous states have starting moving in this direction, Simons worries it’s not enough. elections equipment, said that the vulnerabilities on display in Las Vegas only served to reiterate a need for the country to adopt a nationwide system of verifiable paper ballots and mandatory, statistically significant audits. Barbara Simons, Board Chair of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that since 2003 has studied U.S. Basically, the system is decentralized and lacks key internet links, they say.īefore the 2016 election, former FBI Director James Comey assuaged fears by telling Congress that the system was so “clunky” - comprised of a mishmash of different kinds of machines and networks, with each state’s results managed by a consortium of state and county officials - that its overall integrity was fairly safe.Įlection security advocates aren’t as confident. ![]() Voting machines are not connected to the internet and many states collect voter registration information at the county level, providing a backup to confirm the veracity of the statewide database. I’m not suggesting votes were switched or voters were deleted from voter files, but the point is the security is so lax and so bad that they have no way of going back and doing the forensics and saying one way or the other.”įederal and state officials argue that it would be extremely unlikely for hackers to manipulate vote tallies. “However, the real answer is they have no idea what happened, or of knowing. “One thing that’s been very unfortunate in the way a lot of election officials have talked about the breaches is saying the phrase we have no evidence that X, Y, or Z happened,” Braun added. Voting security experts caution, though, that the country doesn’t have the mechanisms in place to make such a definitive conclusion. 8 came and went with no indication that any votes were altered, a point U.S. On Election Day, the White House staff was so worried about Russian hackers tampering with the actual voting process that it drew up a 15-page contingency plan that included potentially deploying the military and National Guard.īut Nov. officials, the Kremlin’s digital spies targeted at least 21 state voter registration systems and successfully infiltrated at least two, Arizona and Illinois. election in what intelligence officials said was a widespread digital meddling campaign orchestrated by Russian President Vladimir Putin. “If the Russians and Chinese and whoever else can get into NSA and Lockheed Martin and JP Morgan, they absolutely can get into Kalamazoo County or the state of Ohio or the vendor.”Īlready, the country has seen Moscow-backed hackers attack the 2016 U.S. ![]() “‘Unhackable’ is absurd on its face,” Braun said. Instead, Braun said, they need to adopt the private sector model of working to better detect and minimize the effect of successful cyberattacks rather than trying to become impenetrable. The lesson: “The bad guys can get in,” said Jake Braun, a panel moderator at the conference who advised the Department of Homeland Security on cybersecurity during the Obama administration.Īnd that means election officials must acknowledge that no security is foolproof. In the wild, he estimated, it would take him about a minute to break in.Īnne-Marie Hwang, an intern at the digital security firm Synack, demonstrated that by bringing a generic plastic key to mimic the ones given to poll workers and plugging in a keyboard, she could simply hit control-alt-delete and enter the voting machine’s generic password to gain administrative access. “I could have done this in 2004,” said Schurman, who could gain administrative-level access to the voting machine, giving him the power to see all the votes cast on the device and to manipulate or delete vote totals. In a cramped conference room, they took turns over three days cracking into 10 examples of voting machines and voter registration systems - a reminder, they say, of the risks awaiting upcoming U.S. ![]() They were among the hundreds of cybersecurity experts who descended on “Voting Village,” one of the most talked-about features of the annual DEF CON hacker conference.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |