Buy used Voting Machins on eBay (@ 100$) - Is our Democracy in hazard ...???
Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by The Economist. He is the author of 13 books--including Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World--as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers.
This year, he bought two more machines to see if security had improved.He discovered that the newer model machines, those that were used in the 2016 election, are running Windows CE and have USB ports, along with other components, that make them even easier to exploit than the older ones. Our voting machines, billed as "next generation," and still in use today, are worse than they were before as dispersed, disorganized, and susceptible to manipulation.
As per Cory Doctorow a famous security blogger, Voting machines are terrible in every way: the companies that make them lie like crazy about their security, insist on insecure designs, and produce machines that are so insecure that it's easier to hack a voting machine than it is to use it to vote.
The ES&S M650 tabulating type machines machine which are brodly used as perfect Voting Machine, manufactured by Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Nebraska, which still has outstanding defects that were reported to the manufacturer a decade ago. The M650's manifest unsuitability is so terrible that it would be funny if it wasn't so serious: this is a machine that uses an operating system developed for the Blackberry phone (!) and then uses Zip cartridges (!!) to move data around.
The M650 is one of the most widespread pieces of equipment in American election systems, used to count in-person and absentee ballots by optically scanning ballot papers whose bubble-in forms have been filled in by voters. The system -- connected to the internet by default -- is used for county-wide tabulations in 23 states. As the report states: "Hacking just one of these machines could enable an attacker to flip the Electoral College and determine the outcome of a presidential election."
The researchers identified defects in other systems, too: one could be compromised in two minutes, less time than it takes the average voter to cast a ballot on it. Another could be wirelessly hacked with a nearby mobile device and made to register an arbitrary number of votes. The report goes on to warn about attacks on voting machine supply chains, which could compromise whole batches of machines before they even reached the polling place.
Back in 2012, Symantec researcher Bryan Varner bought some used US voting machines on Ebay and found them to be incredibly insecure and full of real, sensitive election data; in 2016, he did it again and things were even worse.
A video posted on the internet by the researchers at the University of Michigan purportedly shows them connecting a home-made electronic device to one of the voting machines used in India.
Professor J Alex Halderman, who led the project, said the device allowed them to change the results on the machine by sending it messages from a mobile phone. "We made an imitation display board that looks almost exactly like the real display in the machines," he told to the BBC. "But underneath some of the components of the board, we hide a microprocessor and a Bluetooth radio. Our lookalike display board intercepts the vote totals that the machine is trying to display and replaces them with dishonest totals - basically whatever the bad guy wants to show up at the end of the election."
In addition, they added a small microprocessor which they say can change the votes stored in the machine between the election and the vote-counting session.
India's electronic voting machines are considered to be among the most tamperproof in the world.There is no software to manipulate - records of candidates and votes cast are stored on purpose-built computer chips.
As per the Election Commissioner of India at that time said "Before the elections take place, the machine is set in the presence of the candidates and their representatives. These people are allowed to put their seal on the machine, and nobody can open the machine without breaking the seals."
The researchers said the paper and wax seals could be easily faked. And thus hacking a voting machines takes less time than voting.Including India which is represented as the Largest Democracy in the
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