More on Diebold security "glitch"

It's not an outrageous security vulnerability, it's a feature (!)

By JOHN PACZKOWSKI
Good Morning Silicon Valley

Are electronic voting machines ever held to any baseline computer security standards? It certainly doesn't seem so. To wit, the discovery of a security hole in Diebold Election Systems' touch-screen voting machines that experts are calling the "worst ever" in a voting system. Discovered by Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer expert who was working at the request of Black Box Voting, the vulnerable technology is intended as a means of quickly upgrading the machines' boot loader, operating system and application program. But it can be easily exploited to load almost any software without a password or proof of authenticity, potentially without leaving any signs the machines have been tampered with. "It's worse than a hole," Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told the Associated Press. "It's a deliberate feature that was added by Diebold that we all believe is unwise."

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