New alarms being raised about voting systems connected online in several states. Could that make them targets for hackers? NBC’s New alarms being raised about voting systems connected online in several states. Could that make them targets for hackers? NBC’s Cynthia McFadden now with the story.
Cynthia McFadden Reports – Voting Machine Systems Vulnerable to Hackers
Cynthia McFadden: We’ve heard it at congressional hearings for years.
Witness 1 Testimony: Our voting machines are not connected to the Internet.
Witness 2 Testimony: Those are not connected.
Witness 3Testimony: The voting machines themselves are not connected to the Internet.
Kevin Scoglin: We knew that wasn’t true.
Kevin Scoglin Proves Election Voting Machines Online
Cynthia McFadden: Cyber security expert Kevin Scoglin wanted to prove it. So he and nine other independent security consultants created their own search engine looking for election systems online.
Kevin Scoglin: We found over 35 had been left online, and we’re still continuing to find more.
Cynthia McFadden: ES&S insists while there are 14,000 of its modems in use, there are firewalls separating those modems from the public Internet and that the modems are turned on for just seconds. Scoglin says that’s not enough.
Kevin Scoglin: We’re seeing Illinois and Michigan.
Cynthia McFadden: Last summer, Scoglin’s team found ES&S voting systems online in at least some of the precincts in 11 states, including the battleground states of Florida, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
If you were able to get inside these voting systems, could you do more than perhaps mess up the preliminary results? Could you actually get deeper inside the system?
Kevin Scoglin: Absolutely, and that’s my biggest concern.
Andrew Appel Computer Scientist Agrees With Kevin Scoglin – Hackers can Change the Software
Cynthia McFadden: Top computer scientist Andrew Appel agrees with Scoglin.
Andrew Appel Computer Scientist: Once a hacker starts talking to the voting machine through the modem, they can hack the software in the voting machine and make it cheat in future elections.
Cynthia McFadden: In August, Scoglin took his results to election officials and the press, assuming the systems will get taken down. We were astonished when he showed us some of those systems are still online.
Andrew Appel Computer Scientist: Modems in voting machines are a bad idea. Those modems are network connections, and that leaves them vulnerable to hacking by anybody who can connect to that network.
