Now I have talked about the rather sketchy business of the Diebold voting machines before. Now the good folks over at The Reg have an article today that talks about a hack for the very same voting machines.
Open Voting found that by toggling a single switch it’s possible to get Diebold’s AccuVote TS touchscreen voting machine to boot from an unverified external flash drive instead of the device’s built-in firmware, which is stored on an EPROM chip.
In fairness, exploiting this shortcoming would require physically opening up the machine and a certain amount of hardware and programming skills, but that’s hardly an insurmountable barrier to a sufficiently motivated hacker.
To be blunt though, it’s not the furry toothed hacker that I’m worried about. It’s the motivated politico with access that really concerns me.
[tags]Diebold Voting Machines, Diebold, Diebold Hack[/tags]