New Fears of Security Risks in Electronic Voting Systems: With primary election dates fast approaching in many states, officials in Pennsylvania and California issued urgent directives in recent days about a potential security risk in their Diebold Election Systems touch-screen voting machines, while other states with similar equipment hurried to assess the seriousness of the problem.
Experts see new Diebold flaw: Computer security experts say they have found the worst security flaw yet in the oft-criticized touch-screen machines that Maryland voters will use in this year's elections, leaving one computer scientist to warn that the state should have "stacks of paper ballots" on hand in case of a complete Election Day breakdown.
The machines, made by Diebold Elections Systems, are "much, much easier to attack than anything we've previously said," said Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer science professor who first cast doubt on the reliability of the technology in a 2003 report.
"On a scale of one to 10, if the problems we found before were a six, this is a 10. It's a totally different ballgame," he said.
3 states issue directives to relieve security flaw in e-voting: Officials in California, Iowa and Pennsylvania said they issued the directives in recent weeks after researchers discovered a feature that could allow someone to load unauthorized software on Diebold Election Systems Inc.'s computerized machines.
A hacker theoretically could use the software to rig or sabotage an election or to perform some other unauthorized function, said Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Three-level security flaws found in Diebold touch-screens: Several vulnerabilities are described in this report.
One of them, however, seems to enable a malicious person to compromise the equipment even years before actually using the exploit, possibly leaving the voting terminal incurably compromised.
