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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (369461)	4/17/2018 2:01:20 PM
From: Alex MG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541957

How to hack elections on Georgia’s electronic voting machines Demonstration shows malware could change election results By Mark Niesse - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution J. Alex Halderman prepares to demonstrate Monday at Georgia Tech how easy it is to hack Georgia’s electronic voting machines. In a hypothetical election, Halderman changed a 2-2 vote between George Washington and Benedict Arnold to make Arnold the winner by 3-1. Curtis Compton/ccompton@ajc.com Posted: 12:29 p.m. Tuesday, April 17, 2018 A rapt audience watched as professor Alex Halderman, an expert on electronic voting machines, changed votes in a hypothetical election before their eyes. At a Georgia Tech demonstration this week, Halderman showed how to rig an election by infecting voting machines with malware that guaranteed a chosen candidate would always win. Four people from the audience voted on the same kind of touch-screen machines used in real Georgia elections, casting ballots for either President George Washington or Benedict Arnold, the Revolutionary War general who defected to the British. Despite a 2-2 split in this election test run, the voting machine’s results showed Arnold won 3-1. Halderman’s hack is a warning to Georgia, one of five states that relies entirely on electronic voting machines without an independent paper backup. “Voting is not as safe as it needs to be,” Halderman, a computer science professor at the University of Michigan, said Monday. “The safest technology is to have voters vote on a piece of paper.” The upcoming May 22 primary elections will continue to use these touch-screen machines, but state legislators are considering switching to a voting system with a paper record for accuracy, possibly in time for the 2020 presidential election. There’s no evidence that Georgia’s election systems have been tampered with. But Halderman said it’s only a matter of time before foreign countries such as China, Iran, North Korea or Russia try to undermine elections by penetrating voting infrastructure in the United States. Russian hackers already attempted to interfere with the 2016 presidential campaign by targeting election systems in 21 states, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in August 2016. Georgia wasn’t one of those states. In addition, 13 Russians were charged this year on allegations they tried to influence the election through social media propaganda. THE ATLANTA JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION J. Alex Halderman, a professor of computer science at the University of Michigan, wrote a program to alter the results of ... Read More For Halderman’s demonstration, he wrote a program to alter the results of elections recorded by AccuVote touch-screen voting machines. He installed that program on a rectangular memory card that fits into the side of the machine, allowing the card to infect the machine. If a hacker penetrated the state’s computer servers, a similar malicious program could be copied to memory cards used for each of the 27,000 voting machines across the state, Halderman said. No one would ever know the results had been changed if the hacker wrote the program to erase itself after the election. Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, said Halderman’s concerns are addressed by state law, regulations and security procedures. State election systems use data encryption and aren’t connected to the internet. “We are prepared,” Broce said. “There are logical and physical safeguards in place for each aspect of the voting system. Halderman would be unable to replicate this outcome in Georgia’s current security environment.” She didn’t provide details about Georgia’s security practices, but Halderman said hackers could find a way. He said hackers could infect election computers by first gaining access to a state employee’s computer, possibly by tricking him or her into clicking on a dangerous link in an email. Once the malware is on one machine, it could reach central election systems through internal networks, USB devices or memory cards. Election computers could also be subverted in person, by someone like a janitor or a temporary worker, Halderman said. Individual voting machines could be tampered with if someone unlocked the latch that protects the memory card port. State Rep. Scot Turner said Georgia’s elected officials should get rid of the state’s electronic voting machines as responsibly and as quickly as possible. “When you see a machine flip votes, you have to admit things are vulnerable,” Turner, a Republican from Holly Springs, said after watching Halderman’s demonstration. “It might take a wide-scale effort to do what he did on a statewide basis, but it can be done. We owe it to the voters to make sure it’s not.” More than 70 percent of U.S. voters use paper ballots, usually by filling in bubbles next to a candidate’s name and then inserting ballots into a tabulation machine. Some jurisdictions use touch-screen machines to print ballots before they’re scanned for tabulation.