Yes , that Bender . The one on the left . A University of Michigan squad got him elect to the Washington DC schooltime board in 2010 by hacking the district ’s electronic absentee voting scheme .
In 2010 , the school board in Washington DC had just erected a new electronic ballot system for its absentee constituents . To prove the organisation — give the paltry performance of e - voting systemsin the past — the school add-in spread out the system to public examination and challenge them to hack on it in four days during the lead - up to the election .
How The 2004 Presidential Election May Have Been Hacked
Alexander Halderman , a professor at the University of Michigan , along with two grad students , took up the challenge , “ How often do you get the opportunity to hack a government web without the possibility of going to jail ? ”
Halderman explain the implicit in methodologyin his account of the attack ,
Our object lens was to approach the system as real attackers would : startle from publically available information , we seem for weakness that would allow us to confiscate dominance , uncloak mystic ballots , and alter the outcome of the mock election .
Within time of day of examining the Ruby on Rails software build that constituted the voting organization , Halderman ’s squad give away a shell shot exposure , allowing them to modify an image directory on the compromise host as well as modification outputs , and had guessed the admin login for the terminal host ( jot : both the name and password were ADMIN ) .
From there , the squad discover vulnerability in the system control the server farm ’s security camera ’s , which allowed them to clock time blast when nobody was around to discover the extra activity . good of all , the team found a PDF hold assay-mark code for every DC elector — you bonk , the one voter expend to forbid electoral fraud and prove their identity .
With this datum , the team was able to change every ballot to a balloting , not for any of the factual candidates , but a write - in for a fictional IT entity with Bender edging out Skynet in his political debut . Their ascendence was so pure that even if new ballot were generated , they too would vote Bender .
Even after changing the systems lumber out screen to read “ own ” and toy the University of Michigan fight vocal , it take system admins a solid two day to discover the changes . They only note when another squad told them the organisation was strong but complained of the euphony when log off . Even more risible , while the Michigan team was rummaging around inside the system , they took the liberty of deflect trespass attempts from other teams including those from a Persian University , India , and China .
That seems entirely too easy a hack for something like vote — one of America ’s basic tenet — particularly given that more than thirty states employ einsteinium - balloting systems . “ The states are in the riding habit of certifying vote systems , typically without testing them or seeing the informant computer code , ” Dr. David Jefferson from Lawrence Livermore National Labs tell at the recent RSA 2012 group discussion in San Francisco . “ In many typeface the voting system uses proprietary codification that political science ca n’t legally go over , and the running of the systems is outsourced to the seller . This situation is begin worse . ” [ Alex Halderman.pdfviaThe Register ]
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