Diebold Quietly Patches (Huge, 10 Year Old,) Security Flaw in Vote Counting Software

[Wilms]

Diebold Quietly Patches Security Flaw in Vote Counting Software

By Kim Zetter

August 12, 2009

Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold, has patched a serious security weakness in its election tabulation software used in the majority of states, according to a lab that tested the new version and a federal commission that certified it.

The flaw in the tabulation software was discovered by Wired.com earlier this year, and involved the program’s auditing logs. The logs failed to record significant events occurring on a computer running the software, including the act of someone deleting votes during or after an election. The logs also failed to record who performed an action on the system, and listed some events with the wrong date and timestamps.

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It’s not known if Premier will offer the more secure version to election officials who purchased previous software. The company did not respond to a call for comment Tuesday.

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Bales went on to say that the GEMS logs had been the same since the software was first created more than a decade ago.

“We never, again, intended for any malicious intent and not to log certain activities,” Bales said. “It was just not in the initial program, but now we’re taking a serious look at that.”

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“It’s really up to interpretation what is an abnormal event and what is a normal event,” Audette says. “ everyone interprets the deletion of votes as abnormal events.”

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http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/08/diebold-audit-logs/


Gotch yer inadequately audited paper ballots right here..."just in case there's any question", LOL!

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

1. It only affects all Diebold systems, right?

and will Diebold be alerting all of the many states who have their lovely machines?

Uh er I mean "Premiere"

[Wilms]

2. Yep. This discovered problem relates to Diebold.

And from what they themselves finally admitted, it affected ALL of their machines.

So figure, what?, 25% of the nation's elections running on these things with that flaw for ten years. Nice.


I figure California got the memo about this re-issue, but for the other jurisdictions...will Diebold alert them?, will the EAC?, will more election officials educate themselves? :shrug: