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The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.
In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software ... to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.
The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the[sic] New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. "None of the employees, ... including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software," the spokesperson said.
[...] Election-management systems are not the voting terminals that voters use to cast their ballots, but are just as critical: they sit in county election offices and contain software that in some counties is used to program all the voting machines used in the county; the systems also tabulate final results aggregated from voting machines.
Software like pcAnywhere is used by system administrators to access and control systems from a remote location to conduct maintenance or upgrade or alter software. But election-management systems and voting machines are supposed to be air-gapped for security reasons—that is, disconnected from the internet and from any other systems that are connected to the internet. ES&S customers who had pcAnywhere installed also had modems on their election-management systems so ES&S technicians could dial into the systems and use the software to troubleshoot, thereby creating a potential port of entry for hackers as well.
[...] In 2006, the same period when ES&S says it was still installing pcAnywhere on election systems, hackers stole the source code for the pcAnyhere software, though the public didn’t learn of this until years later in 2012 when a hacker posted some of the source code online, forcing Symantec, the distributor of pcAnywhere, to admit that it had been stolen years earlier. Source code is invaluable to hackers because it allows them to examine the code to find security flaws they can exploit. When Symantec admitted to the theft in 2012, it took the unprecedented step of warning users to disable or uninstall the software until it could make sure that any security flaws in the software had been patched.
Around this same time, security researchers discovered a critical vulnerability in pcAnywhere that would allow an attacker to seize control of a system that had the software installed on it, without needing to authenticate themselves to the system with a password. And other researchers with the security firm Rapid7 scanned the internet for any computers that were online and had pcAnywhere installed on them and found nearly 150,000 were configured in a way that would allow direct access to them.
Source: Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States
[20180718_130441 UTC; Updated to add: description of election management systems, stolen source code, and report of a critical vulnerability.]
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 18 2018, @06:29PM (9 children)
You don't know what the alternate paths of history would have been. Most of the deaths were caused by extreme distortions of Marx's ideas by self-seeking demagogues, and they would probably have found some other way.
Still, Marx's ideas would not work above the level of a small community. (A single business could also make them work, if it wasn't larger than a small community.) Even in that case making the ideas work requires a continuing ideological commitment that is not natural to human societies. Normally it arises for short periods under the influence of a charismatic leader...and leaves when he either leaves or loses energy.
That said, the large mass of people who basically had nothing to lose combined with a small wealthy group that was oppressing them was a recipe for revolutionary doctrines. Communism wasn't the only one to arise then, so did Nazism and Fascism. (The details are significantly different, e.g. Fascism was more closely connected with nationalism, Nazism was more closely connected with racism, and Communism preached "workers solidarity", but they were equally revolutionary. I suspect that there were also some Christian, etc. revolutionary movements, but those haven't made the history books.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 18 2018, @07:24PM (7 children)
It doesn't go against human nature, you simply have been raised in a society that glorifies the top down pyramid hierarchy and rewards greedy behavior. The natural human state is much more cooperative once the basic needs of food and shelter are no longer a problem.
Basically we have every system eventually subverted by the sociopaths who desire power and control, and that is not the fault of the billions of humans who are not shitty people.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:04AM (6 children)
Before you assert this you need to read up on the great leap forward. China tried eliminating those "sociopaths that desire power and control" by removing them from power and sending them to work and re-education camps. That experiment did not end well. North of 20 million people starved to death. The total death toll was more than double that.
If you want to repeat that experiment you better do something different or you'll join a long line of well intentioned mass murderers.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
(Score: 2) by dry on Thursday July 19 2018, @02:29AM
Wasn't it "sociopaths that desire power and control" who did that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 19 2018, @04:48AM (1 child)
Herp derp whaaa? Oh yeah, the unstated assumption that I meant we should go full guillotine revolution!!!
Thanks, very helpful, I will do my best to be a mal-intentioned mass murderer instead OK???
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:14PM
I'm sorry if that came off harsh, but it needs to. We have a painful history of charismatic leaders starting out with the very best of intentions, genuinely trying to make the world a better place, and killing millions in the process. We have to learn from those mistakes or we will repeat them.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 19 2018, @05:15PM (2 children)
The "Great Leap Forwards" isn't a good counter-example. The same gang stayed in charge, and there's no reason to believe that the punished (or killed) were any worse than those that kept power. The news wasn't any more trustworthy than the news usually is.
That said, I'd be a lot more convinced if "anonymous coward" could come up with even one example of his ideas working out at larger than a village level (or small business level). I can come up with plenty of examples of them working out (for the life of one leader) myself. (Also a number of examples of them failing, but those tend to be less well documented. Also shorter.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by ElizabethGreene on Thursday July 19 2018, @10:59PM (1 child)
It does work in tiny communities; I've seen it. It hits a limit around 40 or 50 people where things start to fall apart. I would be interested to know if there is an evolutionary reason for that limit, and if it varies by ancestry.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 20 2018, @12:23AM
Check out Dunbar's Number. I would guess there's an evolutionary reason for that, but it's also true that there's a systematic reason for it. The more time you need to spend maintaining relationships, the less you have available for anything else. This is why barn-raising and corn-husking bees were common. They let you mix work and maintaining relationships. But that's the context in which Dunbar's number was discovered. Other contexts are likely to vary the number slightly up or down.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Derf the on Thursday July 19 2018, @01:13AM
For the example you were thinking might be out there...
The Taiping (Heavenly Kingdom) Revolution [led by Jesus younger brother, Hong Xiuquan] and it's fall-out. The Christians and their Bible are directly responsible for this one.
It is definitely in the all-time top 20 by by death toll and may even actually take out the top spot; and most of us haven't even heard the story once.
Estimates range from 5 to 100 million dead, 1850's 60's Southern China.
Worth a bit of learning...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_anthropogenic_disasters_by_death_toll#cite_note-15 [wikipedia.org]