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WINVote Voting Machines Used in Virginia Elections are Shockingly Insecure

posted by martyb on Thursday April 16 2015, @04:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the Bzzzt!-Bzzzt! dept.

hash14 writes:

The Virginia election commission, which is responsible for certifying whether machines are fit to be used in elections, has decertified the Advanced Voting Solutions WINVote and for many very good reasons. Amongst the many security flaws in this product are:

  • Weak administrator passwords such as "admin" or "abcde"
  • Use of an embedded version of Windows XP which hasn't been updated since 2004
  • Use of WEP for Wifi encryption
  • An absence of any firewall

Worse still, this machine has been used in actual elections and its lack of any logging or record-keeping means that we'll never know if its weaknesses were used to manipulate the outcome of an election. As a proof of concept, security researchers successfully demonstrated accessing the machine and manipulating the recorded vote counts.

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Marneus68 on Thursday April 16 2015, @05:42PM

    by Marneus68 (3572) on Thursday April 16 2015, @05:42PM (#171669) Homepage

    > WINVote Voting Machines Used in Virginia Elections are Shockingly Insecure
    Not just insecure, but shockingly insecure? Maybe someone should just give then access to the internet so that they can start using twitter to complain about unreal standards of beauty and argue about racism on tumblr.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKuE5-pEo2Y [youtube.com]

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by Alfred on Thursday April 16 2015, @07:26PM

    by Alfred (4006) on Thursday April 16 2015, @07:26PM (#171696) Journal
    Maybe shockingly insecure means that there are bare conductors or the metal case is tied to neutral instead of ground.

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Nobuddy on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:17PM

    by Nobuddy (1626) on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:17PM (#171733)

    Did you read the article? It is shocking. It would be bad on grandma's home computer. It is beyond belief that something as important as a voting machine has hardcoded 5 character passwords- much less easy to guess passwords - and all communicating via WEP to a home server that is equally insecure.

    It would have been shocking to hear this in 2004 when they were new. Now, 14 years later, every election they were used in is now suspect.