Lastest ploy - Electoral College hacked?

[JEEP]

Hmm - the latest Hillary/Deep State ploy to overturn Trump's election? Or to just do away w/ the EC in future 'elections'?

CAN DEAD HACKERS VOTE TWICE? —
Defcon Voting Village report: Bug in one system could “flip Electoral College”

High-speed tabulator vulnerable to remote attacks, and that's only part of the problem.
SEAN GALLAGHER - 9/27/2018

A voting machine is submitted to abuse in DEFCON's Voting Village

Today, six prominent information-security experts who took part in DEF CON's Voting Village in Las Vegas last month issued a report on vulnerabilities they had discovered in voting equipment and related computer systems. One vulnerability they discovered—in a high-speed vote-tabulating system used to count votes for entire counties in 23 states—could allow an attacker to remotely hijack the system over a network and alter the vote count, changing results for large blocks of voters. "Hacking just one of these machines could enable an attacker to flip the Electoral College and determine the outcome of a presidential election," the authors of the report warned.

The machine in question, the ES&S M650, is used for counting both regular and absentee ballots. The device from Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Nebraska, is essentially a networked high-speed scanner like those used for scanning standardized-test sheets, usually run on a network at the county clerk's office. Based on the QNX 4.2 operating system—a real-time operating system developed and marketed by BlackBerry, currently up to version 7.0—the M650 uses Iomega Zip drives to move election data to and from a Windows-based management system. It also stores results on a 128-megabyte SanDisk Flash storage device directly mounted on the system board. The results of tabulation are output as printed reports on an attached pin-feed printer.

The report authors—Matt Blaze of the University of Pennsylvania, Jake Braun of the University of Chicago, David Jefferson of the Verified Voting Foundation, Harri Hursti and Margaret MacAlpine of Nordic Innovation Labs, and DEF CON founder Jeff Moss—documented dozens of other severe vulnerabilities found in voting systems. They found that four major areas of "grave and undeniable" concern need to be addressed urgently. One of the most critical is the lack of any sort of supply-chain security for voting machines—there is no way to test the machines to see if they are trustworthy or if their components have been modified.

Yikes!
"If an adversary compromised chips through the supply chain," the report notes, "they could hack whole classes of machines across the US, remotely, all at once." And despite the claim by manufacturers that the machines are secure because they are "air gapped" from the Internet during use, testing over the last two years at DEF CON discovered remote hacking vulnerabilities requiring no physical access to the voting machines.

In a few cases, the Voting Village's collection of hacker/researchers discovered that hacking the voting machines took less time than voting. One voting machine could be hacked in two minutes. And another hack, exploiting a flaw in an electronic card used to activate voting terminals, made it possible to reprogram the card wirelessly with a mobile device—allowing the voter to potentially cast as many votes as they like.

Perhaps the most frustrating of the problems documented by the researchers is that flaws, even when reported, don't get fixed. One example is another vulnerability in the ES&S M650 that had been reported more than 10 years ago to the manufacturer—but was still present on systems used for the 2016 election.

Defcon Voting Village report: Bug in one system could “flip Electoral College”

Two related Sott posted articles:

Vegas mystery: Slot machines suffer bizarre meltdown just yards from DEF CON hacking convention
RT
Mon, 13 Aug 2018 11:47 UTC

Dozens of Las Vegas slot machines crashed simultaneously over the weekend, just yards from where the annual DEF CON hacking convention was taking place. No explanation for the intriguing development has been offered.

The bizarre shutdown took place between 1am and 2am on Saturday at the Linq Casino - right across the road from Caesars Palace where the convention was taking place.

Attendee Matt Anderson captured the moment and told Mashable: "No-one else knew what was happening, but all slots were dead/errored out."

The Linq said it's investigating the incident. Spokesperson Rich Broom said there was "no evidence whatsoever that there was a hack." RT has contacted Linq for more information.

DEF CON kicked off on Thursday and saw attendees attempt to hack voting machines and cars as part of the four-day conference.

Other unusual activity reported in Vegas over the weekend included a computer screen inside an elevator at the Flamingo hotel showing its command prompt, and a casino game with a Windows box open instead of the game's graphics.

Vegas mystery: Slot machines suffer bizarre meltdown just yards from hacker conference

Hackers test election security by breaking into U.S. voting machines
RT
Sun, 30 Jul 2017 18:37 UTC

Tens of thousands of hackers from around the world were granted access to US voting machines at the Def Con convention in Las Vegas and tested them for hours to find vulnerabilities.

On Friday, Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas was packed with hackers from around the world, where they studied and practiced hacking everything from Twitter accounts to self-driving cars, during the annual Def Con convention.

This was the first year in the convention's 25-year history that included an interactive area on voting machines. The "hacker voting village" gave hackers the ability to break into more than 30 popular voting machines as well as voter databases in a bid to discover vulnerabilities that could be exploited to alter the results of an election.

"We encourage you to do stuff that if you did on election day they would probably arrest you," Matt Blaze, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the event's organizers, said, according to Reuters.

Jake Braun, a former White House liaison to the Department of Homeland Security and another one of the event's organizers, told Reuters that he hopes the convention will dispel claims from many of the companies that make the machines that they are "unhackable."

"There's been a lot of claims that our election system is unhackable. That's BS," Braun said. "Only a fool or liar would try to claim that their database or machine was unhackable."

Over the weekend, hackers have the opportunity to tinker with voting machines that are still used in US elections. Hackers have the freedom to test how the machines can be manipulated remotely or physically through their hardware.

According to the official Twitter page of the event, one hacker was able to gain complete remote control of the operating system of a WINVote machine, including election data, in around an hour and a half.

Hackers also posted updates that they were able to break into Diebold machines and e-polling software within an hour.

At one point, the organizers set up a competition, splitting the group into a blue team that defended a mock Board of Elections network and voter registration database, and a red team that attempted to breach them.

Hackers at the event also heard from security experts and others who are working to keep election systems safe from outside influence.

Blaze said that he hopes the event will also raise awareness about the vulnerabilities of voting machines, and the need for more security.

"You never know what that kind of a spark will ignite. My hope is that we'll see a broadening of the community of people interested in improving the security of our election system," Blaze said, according to USA Today.

Hackers test election security by breaking into U.S. voting machines -- Sott.net

Even if one tries to circumvent the machines by voting absentee or w/ a paper ballot, eventually that vote is going to be entered into a computer - not that we can vote ourselves out of the mess we're in! A total exercise in futility!