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Hackers Say They Took Over Vote Scanners Like Those Coming to Georgia


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The hackers broke into the scanner with a screwdriver and replaced a memory card with one of their own, allowing them to run their own operating system on the machine.

A report from the DEF CON Voting Machine Hacking Village conference described the discovery of a hack for commandeering ballot-scanning machines similar to those soon to be deployed in Georgia.

Credit: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A report from the DEF CON Voting Machine Hacking Village conference described the discovery of a hack for commandeering ballot-scanning machines similar to those soon to be deployed in Georgia.

Hackers at the conference seeking weaknesses in voting technology broke into the scanner with a screwdriver and replaced a memory card, allowing them to run their own operating system.

Jeremy Epstein, vice chair of ACM’s U.S. Technology Policy Committee and an election and cybersecurity expert, said the conference report emphasizes the need for both strong paper-ballot audits, and physical security of voting equipment.

Said Epstein, "The good thing about the paper ballots, unlike the touchscreen machines historically used in Georgia, is in the worst case the paper ballots are in a box" and may be used to verify votes are tabulated accurately.

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Abstracts Copyright © 2019 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA


 

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