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

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 Nobuddy on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:19PM

    by Nobuddy (1626) on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:19PM (#171734)

    I am pretty sure your TV, if cracked, will not change the outcome of an election.
    you have to look at how much something should be secured when you want to compare them.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @10:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @10:06PM (#171754)

    My point is people are thinking of these things like appliances. You buy it and its done. When that is not even remotely true. These are the same people who buy things like a TV and figure its good for 10-15 years.

    Also personal security is just as important as some election. Most of the people that are elected are fairly corrupt anyway so it does not matter much which side of the coin you are voting for.