Monday, November 7, 2016

Cylance: Some Voting Machines Are Vulnerable To Hacking

Irvine-based cybersecurity software developer Cylance said late Friday that its researchers have proven a common model of voting machine is vulnerable to hacking--enabling votes on that machine to be altered--however, only if attackers have physical access to that voting machine. According to Cylance, it figured out how to hack the Sequoia AVC Edge Mk1 voting machine, using a PCMCIA card to reflash the firmware on the device. The vulnerabilities apparently had been previously been identified by researchers in 2007, but had not been demonstrated in practice. According to Cylance, it is recommending supervision/monitoring of physical access to electronic voting machines, frequent verification of hardware and software errors, and the use of "tamper-proof" seals over ports and latches.