To be fair, that's not the only ridiculously easy way to hack a Diebold machine. There's about 17 other ways.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
Is the EPROM socketed? If so, I don't see how this allows someone to do anything that changing the existing EPROM or FLASH* doesn't allow.
*According to the article, this is distinct from the external flash, which despite its name requires access to the inside of the case.
Posted by Nighthawk (Member # 4176) on :
Doesn't anyone feel comfort that the primary product of Diebold are, in fact, ATM machines?
I use to work at Fritz Companies, the freight forwarder for IBM and Diebold. I was standing in a warehouse with 200 other Diebold machines, and I could walk up to any one of them, dismantle them, and see how they worked. Very enlightening.
Posted by BaoQingTian (Member # 8775) on :
Is there a response from the company on this issue? Often times in the development of our boards (the company I work for, not Diebold) we will have test points and other ways to do development work on a prototype. Then when we do the production version, we simply don't load the part.
I find a few things odd about this. 1) They left the instructions for it on the silkscreen where anyone could read it. Terrible practice. 2) They designed it in such a way that the switch must be left on the board to insure other functionality. 3) They didn't control access to the interior better, with some indication if the box had been opened.
The fact of the matter is, if you give someone unlimited hardware access, then you can pretty much hack anything. That's kind of the problem with the whole electronic voting thing.
Posted by BlackBlade (Member # 8376) on :
I say we go back to blowing out labeled candles.
Posted by DarkKnight (Member # 7536) on :
So where are all the calls for a rigged election? Where are the investigations into Evil Diebold and how votes were never counted? Widespread hacking attacks? I wonder why there are no articles about how bad this election was? Very curious....
Posted by KarlEd (Member # 571) on :
quote:Originally posted by DarkKnight: So where are all the calls for a rigged election? Where are the investigations into Evil Diebold and how votes were never counted? Widespread hacking attacks? I wonder why there are no articles about how bad this election was? Very curious....
It's because the Republicans had put Rumsfeld in charge of the rigging. Why do you think he resigned?
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
quote:Originally posted by DarkKnight: So where are all the calls for a rigged election? Where are the investigations into Evil Diebold and how votes were never counted? Widespread hacking attacks? I wonder why there are no articles about how bad this election was? Very curious....
Because many of the methods of committing electronic voting fraud are undetectable. There could easily have been widespread fraud in this election and no one would ever know.
Posted by aspectre (Member # 2222) on :
Actually, I do think that the first and foremost business of the new Congress should be securing the ballot box. That a voting machine is far far more susceptible to tampering than an ATM is absurd beyond belief. There are no property rights, or any other rights, without the right to make our voices heard through an honest vote count.
Posted by KarlEd (Member # 571) on :
Explanantion #2: It's because the elections turned out exactly as the Illuminati planned, and they now control the ballot boxes and the media.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
Well, for one thing, not all precincts use those Diebold machines. Mine, for instance, does not. Second, such a hack would only be useful in a very tight race, because if a landslide for one party suddenly turned into a narrow victory for another, I think people would notice.
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
Unfortunately, while Diebold machines appear to be the least secure, machines by other companies (e.g. Sequoia) also have well-known security flaws.
Posted by Icarus (Member # 3162) on :
But not all precincts do the "no paper trail" thing, which is really, as I see it, the new flaw Diebold introduced. I mean, the old card readers could have been programmed dishonestly too, or the people in charge of reporting results could have all been compromised, who knows? And then, ballot boxes could be stuffed, or votes could be thrown away. At some level, trust was always necessary. But in the past, we had the idea that if there were doubts, we could always recount while looking at the physical original votes. I think that's where the Diebold machines are the most problematic.
Posted by Dan_raven (Member # 3383) on :
DK I think I understand what you are saying.
This current election has just proven one important point.
Dem Hackers whoop'd them Rep Hackers big time.
(insert current and semi-relevant hacker slang/text-message slang here)
I mean, while our forefathers pictured the elction process as an enlightened gathering of civic fathers calmly debating the national situation, we've seen other trends.
We've seen the Machine Politics of the 1800s, the Fashion politics of the Harding era, the General politics of the post WWII era, and the fear politics of the past decade.
However today all had changed.
We bring forth the new, true, technocratic democracy--a Hackocracy.
One day before the election, Karl Rove on NPR was bragging about the secret data-set he had that proved the Republicans would hang onto power.
Some think this was just denial, or positive attitude.
I believe it was source code for voting machines. In the wee hours of Wed morning Rove and his top hacker, Rumsfeld, were busy adjusting votes to give them the self-predicted victory.
Unfortunately another was their hacking better.
For every backdoor R&R (Rove and Rumsfeld) entered, they were defeated by some mysterious uber-hacker. For every state they targeted from Cheney's hidden bunker, two other states were forced into Dem hands.
Finally they had to admit defeat.
For his failure, Rumsfeld was sent into the purgatory of private contractor land.
For Rove's bigger failure, he was denied the financial opportunity to be made in the purgatory of private contractor land.
But the question remains, who was it? What Democrat had the nerve, the drive, the awsome skills to defeat R&R?
They would have to be a computer genius.
They would have to be an internet god.
They would have to be the nerd's nerd.
I can't name names, not where the NSA can track me down, but I can give a hint.
He may not be the real father of the internet, but I swear when he passed Cheney in the halls of power yesterday, he said "Who's your daddy now #$@#$?"
And you thought all Gore was good for was hacking weather computers to forecast global warming predictions, didn'y you.
Posted by Lupus (Member # 6516) on :
people talk about hacking voting machines, but it would be a lot easier to "hack" paper ballots. All you need to do is stuff the ballot box. It would be a whole lot easier than hacking a voting machine.
Posted by kmbboots (Member # 8576) on :
Lupus, that would require election judges to be "in on it." It also leaves evidence.
I was somewhat reassured by the checkable, paper record of my vote.
Posted by kmbboots (Member # 8576) on :
Lupus, that would require election judges to be "in on it." It also leaves evidence.
I was somewhat reassured by the checkable, paper record of my vote.
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
quote:Originally posted by Lupus: people talk about hacking voting machines, but it would be a lot easier to "hack" paper ballots. All you need to do is stuff the ballot box. It would be a whole lot easier than hacking a voting machine.
When your votes are being tabulated by an internet-connected PC running a vanilla installation of Windows XP and being stored in an unencrypted Microsoft Access database, rigging the entire precinct electronically becomes a lot easier than doing it by stuffing ballot boxes. What's more, it can be done undetectably.
quote:Originally posted by Icarus: But not all precincts do the "no paper trail" thing, which is really, as I see it, the new flaw Diebold introduced. I mean, the old card readers could have been programmed dishonestly too, or the people in charge of reporting results could have all been compromised, who knows? And then, ballot boxes could be stuffed, or votes could be thrown away. At some level, trust was always necessary. But in the past, we had the idea that if there were doubts, we could always recount while looking at the physical original votes. I think that's where the Diebold machines are the most problematic.
It's true that a paper trail is better than no paper trail, but consider this from the last page of my link above:
quote:Finally, it's worth reiterating that optical scan machines are vulnerable to many of the same exploits as the DREs [direct-recording electronic voting machines] on which this article focuses. Optical scan machines do leave a paper audit trail, but that trail is worthless in a state (like Florida) where manual audits of optical scan ballots are not undertaken to clear up questions about the unexpected returns from certain precincts. I've been told that such audits are now prohibited in Florida by law in the wake of the 2000 voting scandal.
About the last sentence -- is that prohibition actually there?
I've linked that article here before -- I think it's well worth reading the whole thing, along with the rest of Ars Technica's e-voting coverage.
Posted by Enigmatic (Member # 7785) on :
quote: Dem Hackers whoop'd them Rep Hackers big time.
(insert current and semi-relevant hacker slang/text-message slang here)
I believe the terminology you are searching for is "pwn3d!"
--Enigmatic
Posted by human_2.0 (Member # 6006) on :
I highly doubt this election got hacked. Too soon.
HOWEVER. I predict the next election will get hacked so bad, that all the hackers will step on each others hacks and it will all be exposed. It will be like the bot wars. Only the Central American drug lords, Pfizer, and Republicians will be the bad-hatters.
Kinda like Code Red, Nimda and a bunch of other agressive Windows malware. If they weren't so greedy for CPU and network resources, they wouldn't get noticed.
Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
quote:Lupus, that would require election judges to be "in on it." It also leaves evidence.
Am I understanding correctly that you would have to open the case of the voting machine in order to do this hack?
And the Dems have been known to make bold declarations of certain victory right before election day. If it hadn't been Rove saying it, no one would be questioning him.
Dan- Posted by aspectre (Member # 2222) on :
Most of the hacks are phone-in or over the internet, depending on the connection to the tabulating machine. Making the tabulating machines equally vulnerable to hacking. So there is no check between voting machines and tabulating machines inregards to after-the-fact hacks. Especially not between Diebold and ESS machines: the owners are brothers-in-law.
And what makes you think Rove failed?
[ November 12, 2006, 12:59 AM: Message edited by: aspectre ]
Posted by twinky (Member # 693) on :
Here is a summary of some of the problems with electronic voting machines that occured this past election. The example from Florida is particularly telling.
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)