In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Diebold Update
Students Fight E-Vote Firm
A group of students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has launched an "electronic civil disobedience" campaign against voting machine maker Diebold Election Systems.
The students are protesting efforts by Diebold to prevent them and other website owners from linking to some 15,000 internal company memos that reveal the company was aware of security flaws in its e-voting software for years but sold the faulty systems to states anyway. The memos were leaked to voting activists and journalists by a hacker who broke into an insecure Diebold FTP server in March.
I have to correct Wired here (and they should really know better), but I don't think saying "a hacker who broke into an insecure Deibold FTP server" is appropriate when the person just entered anonymous as the password. Do you break into a house when a door is open? And what do you think of a manufacture of ATM machines and voting machines, i.e. machines that require well thought out security features, placing all these documents on an anonymous ftp site?
Among the revelations in the memos was news that the Microsoft Access database used by the Diebold system to count votes was not protected by a password. This means anyone could alter votes by entering the database through an insecure backdoor, via physical access to the machine or remotely, via the phone system.
The memos also reveal that the audit log, which records any activity in the Access database, could be easily altered so that an intruder could erase a record of the intrusion.
These security flaws were pointed out to Diebold in 2001 in memos from a firm that was being paid to audit and certify the software. A Diebold engineer responded by saying the company preferred not to password-protect the database because it was easier for them (presumably Diebold employees) to go into the software and do "end-runs" in the system -- a term that describes when someone changes software to fix or work around coding problems.
Other memos indicate that patches were installed in systems after the systems already were certified and delivered to states.
Maryland. If you are listening, you can probably get your money back.
- rob 2:35 PM - [PermaLink] -
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