Diebold's voting machines far from hack-proof

well... i certainly feel reassured NOW...

Ion Sancho wants to get things right this time. As supervisor of elections for Leon County, Florida, he stood at the epicenter of the election fiasco of 2000. Voter confidence, he realizes, is paramount. That's why he's let a computer hacker have a go at one of his new machines.

The apparatus in question is the Accuvote 2000 Optical Scan, a boxlike computer that reads ballots as they are inserted. The data is collected and stored on a memory card that's later uploaded into a central tabulator. Diebold, the machine's Canton-based manufacturer, claims that the memory cards cannot be altered to influence votes. Sancho figured he'd find out for himself.

In May, he gave Dr. Herbert Thompson access to an Accuvote 2000. As hackers go, Thompson doesn't quite fit the mold of a pasty-faced kid playing Warcraft in Mom's basement: He's the chief strategist at Security Innovation, a Florida tester of online security for IBM, Microsoft, Google, and other large businesses and government agencies. If anyone can uncover a problem, it's this guy.

But not even Thompson could have expected this: He was able to manipulate a memory card using homemade devices. When he inserted it into the Diebold machine, 10,000 votes were awarded to one candidate, and the Accuvote detected no sign of fraud.

In a later test coordinated by Sancho, another security expert was also able to manipulate results, this time with flair: He programmed the Leon County computer's LCD screen to read: "Are We Having Fun Yet?", an homage to the 1983 hacker movie WarGames.

(thanks to raw story...)

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