The Targeting Of Elections By Hackers:

The Targeting Of Elections By Hackers

One of the main things to understand is that hacking is not new to the technology age, this is simply entering unauthorized and altering for your own purposes. This can be done with or without technology. Since the inception of elections humans have been trying to find ways to shift said election to their advantage. In the past violent tactics were used to scare voters away, currently locations where you can vote are decreased and shifted by the republican parties locally to stop election. Voter rolls are purged of voters that don’t fit the narrative or vision of those whom seek election. Throughout the world voting is becoming increasingly electronic, this means that the technology itself has become a target and will remain a target for years to come. Since they are targets, we must figure out ways constantly to protect them and much of this hinges on understand how voting machines work and the websites that control voter registration work.

How online voter registration websites work

This is simple, these websites work like nearly every other website that you’ve ever been on. You register with information about yourself so that you can be verified or identified. The information is collected via a form you feel out and that data is help in a database so that it can be queried or rather pulled up at any time. There is also a counter, with algorithms that add up the votes for each candidate, there are of course ways in which this information is backed up and saved later. The chances are you’re voting habits and information will eventually be sold at some later point in history. Just like most form based registration, there is the risk of things such as “sql injections” this type of attack is simply used to get more information out to the form than what’s there. Essentially, just because the form only says “Username and Password”, does not prevent me from using other commands within those boxes or on that page to query additional information. This can be done manually or done with software commands that can query hundreds, thousands of people’s data. Just as humans an protect software, networks and systems other humans can attack them. It is essential to make it harder on hackers.

How Voting Machines Work

There are different types of machines, the initially electronic machines were more susceptible to hacking. These machines took in paper ballots and read those ballots as best they could. These machines were mostly reliable, however mechanical issues along with humans incorrectly, or filling the ballot out messy made these machines prone to issues. Another issue with those machines was limited security technology, the software on many of these types of machines can only be updated by the manufacturer, sometimes this had to be done onsite, this quite often meant that many machines went without updates for years. The newer machines do not use paper ballots or have much of a mechanical side, they are more software based, typically networked in which enables security updates to occur more often. Although the newer machines are better it remains a race against skilled hackers. Some of these hackers are working on their own, some are backed by governments throughout the world interfering with each other’s elections. Most of the newer hacks that are occurring are SQL Injection based hacks on servers. For more in depth information about how an "SQL Injection" works click here.