This article is a “mea culpa” from Cybersecurity and infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—the agency that famously said that our 2020 elections was the most secure ever and that the machines or election management systems can’t be connected to the internet. Now, just prior to the Halderman report being issued they are saying that the systems are capable of being hacked and that there are vulnerabilities that could have potentially affected more than 16 states. The Halderman report cites the issue of USB flash drives being one way that malware or viruses can be launched onto the election management system. This was an issue that our cyber expert Burl brought up in our recent whitepaper on ES&S. (And make no mistake ALL of these systems are vulnerable not just Dominion as they have similar architecture and software and are derivatives of the prior Diebold election system.
This is concerning as our ES&S systems across the state were updated last year to upload Windows 10 (they were purchased with Windows 7 in 2019). The method of upgrade was that ES&S representatives came and inserted flash drives into each machine to update the software. How do we know that these flash drives weren’t corrupted? Note that we have asked our election commission to provide evidence of penetration testing to ensure the security of our systems and there were no records responsive to our request. How can we be confident in our election infrastructure when we hear reports like this? We also know that political leaders on both sides of the aisle have complained about the fact that these election systems can be hacked. Here is a video of democrats doubting election results.
All machines can be hacked even if they are air-gapped. Early voting for 2 weeks only gives nefarious actors more data to know how much to cheat. We need to move to paper ballots and hand counting. Scrap the machines.