From: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4066
In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website.
In another stunning blow to the security and integrity of Diebold's electronic voting machines, someone has made a copy of the key which opens ALL Diebold e-voting machines from a picture on the company's own website.
Good lord in heaven. How dumb are these guys at Diebold?! Can you believe the United States has actually entrusted them to build a security system for the original U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights?!
After everything else... now comes this.
It was revealed in the course of last summer's landmark virus hack of a Diebold touch-screen voting system at Princeton University that, incredibly, the company uses the same key to open every machine. It's also an easy key to buy at any office supply store since it's used for filing cabinets and hotel mini-bars! That is, if you're not a poll worker who already has one from the last time you worked on an election (anybody listening down there in San Diego?).
The Princeton Diebold Virus Hack, if you've been living in a cave, found that a single person with 60 seconds of unsupervised access to the system, who either picked the lock (easy in 10 seconds) or had a key, could slip a vote-swapping virus onto a single machine which could then undetectably affect every other machine in the county to steal an entire election.
But the folks at Princeton who discovered the hack (after our own organization, VelvetRevolution.us, gave them the Diebold touch-screen machine on which to perform their tests) had resisted showing exactly what the key looked like in order to hold on to some semblance of security for Diebold's Disposable Touch-Screen Voting Systems.
But guess what? Diebold didn't bother to even have that much common sense.
This idiotic company has had a photograph of the stupid key sitting on their own website's online store!
Read on: http://www.bradblog.com/?p=4066
From what I know of keys (which isn't much), those don't look all that difficult to figure out. They look like the same brass keys you get when you buy a cheap padlock. I imagine that anyone that reads a how-to on picking locks could make short work of any lock utilizing that key. Hell, the key for my car is laser cut and has a chip in it that matches it to my VIN.
I would like to think there are other security measures in place. Like, if the case is opened the machine shuts down and stays down until an admin re-authenticates it on the network. At the very least an alarm should sound anytime the machine is opened or shaken or any cables disconnected.
That's in addition to more low tech security measures. Election workers verify every voter before sending them into the booths, so they know exactly how many people showed up to vote. So, if there are 10,000 votes received from a polling location that only had 2,000 actual people show up to vote, then that SHOULD trigger some red flags.
I doubt this poses any real threat for the primary election and the situation will likely be resolved before the general election. However, I'm sure a number of conspiracy theorists will be leaping at this as a reason why their favorite candidate didn't win.