(This story is much more detailed than others posted in the last few hours. Please read)
In Annapolis, tales of trickery, vote rigging
For a week, the computer whizzes laid abuse - both high- and low-tech - on the six new briefcase-sized electronic voting machines sent over by the state.
One guy picked the locks protecting the internal printers and memory cards. Another figured out how to vote more than once - and get away with it. Still another launched a dial-up attack, using his modem to slither through an electronic hole in the State Board of Elections software. Once inside, he could easily change vote totals that come in on Election Day.
"My guess is we've only scratched the surface," said Michael A. Wertheimer, who spent 21 years as a cryptologic mathematician at the National Security Agency.
snip...
Meanwhile, William A. Arbaugh, an assistant computer science professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and part of the team, easily sneaked his way into the state's computers by way of his modem. Once in, he had access to change votes from actual precincts - because he knew how to exploit holes in the Microsoft software.
Those holes should have been patched through regular updates sent to customers, patches that haven't been installed on the elections equipment since November.
"There's no security that's going to be 100 percent effective. But the level of effort
was pretty low," Arbaugh said. "A high school kid could do this. Right now, the bar is maybe 8th grade. You want to raise the bar to a well-funded adversary."
http://www.sunspot.net/news/bal-te.md.machine30jan30,0,6436243.story?coll=bal-home-headlines
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