Bryan Varner, a Symantec researcher, bought some used voting machines of the US back in 2012. He found the voting machines on eBay and according to Varner the machines were incredibly insecure and filled with sensitive and crucial data of election. Varner did the same back in 2016, and he found out that things have become worse.
Truthfully the voting machines are dreadful in every single way, the companies who are in charge of making the voting machines lie a lot regarding the security of those machines. The companies even lie about the designs which are incredibly insecure, and in the meantime, the machines which are produced are extremely easy to hack rather than using them to vote.
Reportedly Varner had paid less than $100 for two machines. Upon unscrewing the nonfunctional “tamper-proof screws,” Varner encountered a Windows CE machine with open conventional USB ports that still bear the “property of” seal from some of the government entities who have sold them. Varner has also pointed out that anyone could do this and then the machines can be put one more time on eBay for sale to different voting authorities.
To counter this misfortune, some rules should be placed which are affordable and straightforward. The government officials who are in charge of selling the voting machines can initiate lifecycle management of the components which creates the election system. Bad factors can be deflected by monitoring and regulating the selling of used voting machines.
According to Bryan, most of the information of the voting machines are stored in an non-encrypted state on hard drives, and this makes the data vulnerable if the voting machine is sold to wrong people. Another vulnerability of the electronic voting machines is the memory chip used in them. These flash memories are extremely inexpensive that they are available for a price tag of $15 and they are also programmed using simple codes which allows the voter to vote multiple times.
