College student gets a year in the slammer for keylogging student accounts to rig election

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On the last day of the four-day 2012 election for student council, computer techs noticed that something was a bit off with one of the university's computers.

Viewing it remotely, they noted that whoever was using the computer cast vote after vote.

The techs then watched the mysteriously multi-voting user log into the account of a university official. There, he read an email from a student who complained that the system was preventing her from voting.

There were actually quite a few students who couldn't vote in that election, because their login details had been electronically pickpocketed by the same young man who was running for student council president.

That man, former California State University San Marcos student Matthew Weaver, has been found guilty of using keyloggers to steal nearly 750 student passwords, many of which he then used to log in to others' accounts and to then fraudulently cast votes for himself and four of his fraternity brothers.

On Monday Weaver was sentenced in federal court to a year in prison, according to the U-T San Diego.

Authorities said that Weaver installed keyloggers on 19 school computers, managed to steal credentials for a whopping 745 students, and cast ballots from the accounts of 630 of them.

When campus police tracked him down, Weaver was sitting at a school computer with the keyloggers.

Weaver, now 22, was a third-year business student when he cooked up the scheme to rig the March 2012 election. He started months in advance, with police finding a PowerPoint presentation he'd created earlier in the year.

The presentation proposed running for president along with four of his frat brothers, who would run as vice presidents.

Weaver's presentation noted that his intended position came with a $8,000 stipend, while the vice presidents each stood to get a $7,000 stipend, for a total of $36,000.

Police also found traces of Weaver's research into the matter, including computer searches on such phrases as "how to rig an election" and "jail time for keylogger".

Then, a month prior to the election, Weaver bought three keyloggers, in the form of small electronic devices, to surreptitiously record keystrokes.

Because landing in jail for a brief stint obviously wasn't enough to convince him that wire fraud isn't a wise course, he and a friend cooked up a business plan of action that was even worse: to attempt to deflect the blame, they created fake Facebook pages using names of real students, posted fake conversations, and tried to make it look like the students had framed him.

Those manufactured conversations were sent to reporters at a few media outlets, but none fell for it, the U-T San Diego reports.

Weaver pleaded guilty to three federal charges, including wire fraud and unauthorized access to a computer.

As the judge pointed out to the U-T San Diego, Weaver jumped from the frying pan into the fire - or, in the judge's own words, he was "on fire" for the crime, and then he went and poured gasoline on it to try to cover it up.

Don't try this at home, kids. Don't play with matches, and don't mess with keyloggers.

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Image of Vote For Me and keyboard courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board - Register

RSA 2012 Security experts have warned that electronic voting systems are decades away from being secure, and to prove it a team from the University of Michigan successfully got the foul-mouthed, drunken Futurama robot Bender elected to head of a school board.

In 2010 the Washington DC election board announced it had set up an e-voting system for absentee ballots and was planning to use it in an election. However, to test the system, it invited the security community and members of the public to try and hack it three weeks before the election.

"It was too good an opportunity to pass up," explained Professor Alex Halderman from the University of Michigan. "How often do you get the chance to hack a government network without the possibility of going to jail?"

With the help of two graduate students, Halderman started to examine the software. Despite it being a relatively clean Ruby on Rails build, they spotted a shell injection vulnerability within a few hours. They figured out a way of writing output to the images directory on the compromised server, and of encrypting traffic so that the front-end intrusion detection system couldn't spot them. The team also managed to guess the login details for the terminal server used by the voting system. This wasn't exactly difficult, since the user name and password were both "admin".

Once in, the team searched the government servers for additional vulnerabilities and system options. They found that the cameras installed to watch the voting systems weren't protected, and used them to work out when staff left for the day and so wouldn't spot server activity. More worrying, they also found a PDF file containing the authentication codes for every Washington DC voter in the forthcoming election.

The team altered all the ballots on the system to vote for none of the nominated candidates. They then wrote in names of fictional IT systems as candidates, including Skynet and (Halderman's personal favorite) Bender for head of the DC school board. They also set up systems so that any further ballots would come under their control.

According to the log files the team found, plenty of people were also busy trying to get into the system. They spotted attempts to get in from the Persian University, as well as India and China. Using their inside access, they blocked these attacks. Finally, they inserted the word "owned" onto the final signoff screen of the voting page, and set up the University of Michigan football fight song to play after 15 seconds.

It took two days before the authorities discovered they'd been pwned, and they were only alerted to that fact when another tester told them the system was secure, but that they should lose the music on the sign-off screen, as it was rather annoying. Halderman has now published a full account of the attack.

The attack demonstrates several of the flaws in electronic voting systems, and at numerous sessions at the RSA 2012 conference in San Francisco, experts have consistently warned against the dangers of this technology. In the US, there are 33 states that have introduced some kind of electronic voting systems – and none of them are secure enough to resist a determined attacker said Dr. David Jefferson from Lawrence Livermore National Labs.

"The states are in the habit of certifying voting systems, typically without testing them or seeing the source code," he said. "In many cases the voting system uses proprietary code that government can't legally check, and the running of the systems is outsourced to the vendors. This situation is getting worse."

E-voting was a national security issue, he said. Financial attacks by hackers are relatively easy to detect – because at some point money has to leave the system. But if an election is hacked then we may never know, because it's a one-time action that typically isn't checked after the results have been announced and officials elected.

It will be decades before we have the technology to vote securely, Jefferson said, if indeed it is even possible. At stake is democracy itself, but politicians don't seem to understand the problems of electronic voting, and both Jefferson and Halderman expressed fears for the future if current systems become more popular. ®

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