How to Hack Voting Machines for Fun and Profit
Voting is great and everything, but wouldn’t it be awesome if you could make your vote count more than once? Or, even better, change other people’s votes to be for your candidate of choice? Well, good news, America! Now that we’re using poorly-designed and insecure electronic voting machines, you can do just that with some simple hacking! And thanks to some researchers at Princeton, anyone can be a voting machine hacker. Here, we’ll show you how!
The Princeton University Centre for Information Technology Policy has gone and published a report detailing the security vulnerabilities of the Sequoia e-voting machines and exactly how they hacked them. It turns out you just need to replace a single ROM chip, a process that takes about 7 minutes. Just tell the poll workers that you’re undecided and need to really think about it in the booth.
Even better? Once you install fraudulent firmware on one machine, it can virally spread itself to other machines, meaning you can commit widespread voter fraud across your entire state by just messing with one single machine. Isn’t that awesome! And it’ll keep propagating itself, effecting the next election as well, and the election after that.
Oh, and that fraudulent firmware? It’s a mere 122 lines of code and took them 2 days to write. They say that anyone with a computer science background could cook it up pretty easily.
America! Wooooooo hoo! [Ars Technica]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
The grammar nazi in me notices the use of the wrong ‘affect’:
And it’ll keep propagating itself, effecting the next election as well, and the election after that.
the definition of “affect” is “to have an effect on” so i’m pretty sure that “affecting” is in fact, correct in this case.
e.g.
” the dampness began to affect my health”
or perhaps
“it’ll (pronoun, referring in this case to fraudulent firmware) keep propagating itself, affecting the next election as well, and the election after that.
I think it is better to look at the context of what you have said than that of your “writing”. The point here is not “effect” but the credibility of the system and the voted official… In any case, Why would someone wanted to hack these things?
silly american’s. no one ever hacked a pencil and paper.