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| US Cyber Pros: Hackers Could Hit Electronic Voting Machines Next |
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When the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks published leaked emails of the U.S. Democratic National Committee last month, it caused major embarrassment to the party, that it’s shared U.S. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to quit.
That outcome shows foreign hackers can achieve political goals and incentivizes them to escalate their attacks, as cyber security analyst Richard Forno told Hashtag VOA via Skype.
"Interfering with the electoral process and political process of countries is sort of a classic tool of intelligence and foreign policy.
So this really reinforces the fact that - even though moving towards an era of electronic voting and technology-enabled voting everywhere, or in more and more places - that the traditional threats are still with us, and are now moving further, further into cyberspace."
Electronic voting machines are part of that cyberspace.
The vast majority of U.S. states will use them for this November's national elections.
But a 2015 study by New York University found that 43 of those states have machines that are at least a decade old.
Could they be hacked as well?
Cyber security pros attending their annual Black Hat conference in Las Vegas think so.
One of them, Toni Gidwani said via Skype that there is a precedent for such attacks.
"Three days before the election, the Ukrainian central election committee suffered a massive hack that threatened their ability to, you know, have voting happen on schedule.
And then malware was discovered right before the results were announced that projected a totally different outcome."
Some U.S. voting machines produce paper records that can be used in case of problems with the vote counts.
But keeping a paper trail might not be enough.
Cyber security analysts say organizations seeking to protect their infrastructure from hackers need all personnel to be cautious in their online behavior.
Michael Lipin, VOA News, Washington |
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