But Diebold’s current problems aren’t limited to voting machines. More startling was the discovery of malware designed to attack its ATMs. Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant for the security company Sophos, says the company found a sample in its archives.
“If [the malware] were planted on the version of Windows on those Diebold machines,” Cluley says, “you could actually steal information from the cards being used on the device, and hackers with a specially crafted card would get a receipt with people’s information.” Diebold sent out a customer warning in January and provided a software update.
As in the Kentucky voting machine case, the attack on Diebold’s ATMs requires inside access. “We’re seeing more and more organized criminal gangs because of the money they can make,” says Cluley, pointing out how difficult it would be to spot a legitimate maintenance engineer who’s been bought off installing an extra patch off a USB stick in a back pocket.
For consumers, the problem is that both ATMs and voting machines are black-box technologies. You can count your cash and keep the receipt; but if someone else withdrew the money you can’t prove it wasn’t you. “It’s the same with voting,” Mercuri says. “You have no way to prove or disprove how you voted.”
At least with voting, citizen groups are motivated to push for greater transparency. In the UK, Jason Kitcat, Green councilor for Brighton and Hove, on the south coast of England, organized volunteers to observe e-voting trials in the 2007 local government elections in England and Scotland on behalf of the Open Rights Group.
“We saw the same audit log issues,” he says. “We know from a computer science point of view that making an audit log that can’t be changed is impossible. But it seems as if there’s a huge disconnect between people who are computer-science literate, and the people delivering the policy.”
Besides, politicians like making uncontroversial decisions. Who could fault them for trusting a company that makes ATMs worldwide? Again, it comes back to humans.
“The folks who buy ATMs [bank managers] and voting machines [election officials] don’t really want to pay for a facility that will make it easier for people to challenge them,” says Ross Anderson, a professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, England.
“In the long run, of course, this ends up costing them more: fraud can lead to challenges that are systemic rather than local. Nevertheless, the purchasers may be rational. Most of the bank managers who bought crap ATM systems in the ’80s are retired now — they got away with it. With voting machines, some vendors have been discredited in some countries, but lots of money has still been made.”
That is, from us — the taxpayer and the bank customer. Kitcat says: “It is shocking that in this day and age this has been allowed to continue.”
RSS