Hackers are looking to disrupt the upcoming U.S. election in November by hacking voter registration databases. A few disappearing names here and there wouldn’t make a difference, but if millions of people showed up to the polls and weren’t registered to vote, that would make a huge difference. Voters can still vote with provisional ballots, but they usually do not carry many at each polling location and it can cause chaos at the polls. If certain areas, such as L.A. county are hacked, that’s 4.8 million people that could be affected.
Link: http://www.csoonline.com/article/3128034/security/hacked-voter-registration-systems-a-recipe-for-election-chaos.html?google_editors_picks=true
I think the entire election process can be the target of hackers where there is possibility that the election database can be hacked initially to create chaos but even after the elections the hackers can target the final count to make undesirable changes to favour their desirable candidate
This will always be an issue when you are using electronic devices to satisfy the election. Maybe its time to go back to paper voting and manually count the votes. Might sound primitive, but at least it will mitigate the fraud that most likely goes on using electronic devices.
I think the following comment in the article is interesting:
“Nevertheless, hacking an election would be far from easy, he added. For example, there’s no central authority when it comes to ballot counting or voter registration. Instead, management of U.S. elections is spread out across 50 different states, and then to thousands of counties.”
Complexity is not a control. While it might be complex to create an hack that could greatly impact voter registration data, the individuals that would be interested in doing this are nation state sponsored groups. If hackers find that some systems do not have technical controls to prevent attacks such as SQL injection and unauthorized access, they may invest to use these techniques more broadly to make an impact. All jurisdictions should be held to control standards and their controls should be independently tested for design and effectiveness.
This is a topic that has been in the spotlight over the last few months and hopefully states like Florida, North Carolina, and so forth has implemented necessary adjustments to prevent hacking of their voting systems.
It was actually a good thing this point was raised early enough to help all fifty states to better prepare for any possible attacks.