Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by janrinok on Saturday October 15 2016, @01:14AM   Printer-friendly
from the easy-peasy dept.

Five years ago, Vladimir Putin publicly fumed that the US was interfering with internal Russian politics. He felt that the US emboldened local protestors by claiming that the 2012 Russian elections (which he won with more than a 46 point margin) were rigged. It's been said he's seeking payback by discrediting American elections. Not necessarily to help one candidate over another (Putin has said "We don't back anyone – it's not our business"), but to throw the legitimacy of US elections into doubt the same way he believes the US delegitimatized his landslide victory of 2012.

We've been told that hacking the vote would be difficult due to the wide variety of locally implemented voting systems. But that doesn't necessarily apply to state-level voter registration databases. Introducing minor amounts of errors, even just 1% of the total records could cause chaos on election day. If 1 in every 100 voters is turned away from the polls, that would have enormous repercussions on the election, far greater than the hanging chads had in Florida. There have already been reports of the exfiltration of registration data in two states and attacks on registration systems in another 20 states.

Now a white hat hacker has demonstrated just how easy it is to modify registration data in Indiana using only publicly available data.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 15 2016, @12:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 15 2016, @12:40PM (#414581)

    > Security through effort? The only "effort" put into this security "scheme" is, competing interests from various vendors.

    I see you have no actual experience with security. All security is about raising the level of effort for the attacker. There is no such thing as perfect security, there is only cost to compromise versus value of a successful compromise. Figuring out how to compromise a thousand different systems is literally 1000x more expensive than figuring out how to compromise a single system. You've been around long enough you must have heard the arguments about exploits of a microsoft monoculture.