Ahead of US election, angst over hacking threats

WASHINGTON: At a Boston technology conference last month, computer scientist Alex Halderman showed how easy it was to hack into an electronic voting machine and change the result, without leaving a trace.

Halderman staged a mock election in which three conference attendees voted for George Washington, but an infected memory card switched the result to give a two-to-one victory to Benedict Arnold, the military officer who sold secrets during the Revolutionary War.

Halderman’s demonstration was on a voting machine still in use in 20 US states, which had no paper ballots that could be compared to the electronic output, and thus no way to determine if vote totals had been altered.

“What keeps me up at night is the threat that a hostile nationstate could probe every swing state or swing district (and) find the ones most weakly protected, to silently change the results of a national election,” the University of Michigan professor said.

A month ahead of the midterm congressional elections, security experts say the risks remain high for a hack on voting machines or other targets.

The vote comes two years after the US national election in which, according to intelligence officials, Russian agents probed voter registration networks in at least 20 states and accessed at least one.