Voting machines are becoming more common but there is a large concern about them - their security is horrible. From Cory Doctorow writing at BoingBoing:
Defcon vote-hacking village shows that "secure" voting machines can be broken in minutes
Since the 2000 Bush-Gore election crisis and the hanging-chad controversy, voting machine vendors have been offering touchscreen voting machines as a solution to America's voting woes -- and security researchers have been pointing out that the products on offer were seriously, gravely defective.
Nearly 20 years later, the country's voting security debt has mounted to incredible heights, and finally, just maybe, the security researchers are getting the hearing they deserve.
This year's Defcon security conference in Las Vegas sports a "Voter Hacking Village" where surplus voting machines (purchased in secondary markets like Ebay) were made available to security researchers who'd never had an opportunity to examine them, who were then invited to hack them in a timed trial.
The winning team hacked their machine in minutes.
A sobering article - it was as simple as plugging in a keyboard and mouse and hitting [CTRL]+[ALT]+[DEL]. The machine was running embedded WinXP.
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