Incidents

Hackers Could Meddle With the Voting Campaign

A rather disturbing perspective

By Alexandru Dumitru, Security News Editor

11th of October 2007, 18:41 GMT

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Hackers are known to have a taste for sites that attract a lot of visitors, and next year is election year in the United States. Malicious users could take advantage of the traffic electoral sites are going to get, for their own inscrutable purposes, as pointed out by security experts on Symantec's website.

Now, hacking such sites is not something new - several weeks ago there was a piece of news about a hacker which hit a English site and made it redirect users to XXX pages. Here is my article on that, if you'd like to read it.

People trust official government sites, which is a normal thing, so defacing one of those could make a hacker really happy. I think people won't even consider it twice, before clicking on any link - they feel safe on government sites.

"Crimeware can collect personal, potentially sensitive, or legally questionable information about individuals that malicious actors can use either to intimidate voters or hold for ransom to sway votes. A carefully placed, targeted key logger has the potential to cause material damage to a candidate in the process of an election. Such code may also be targeted towards campaign staff, family members, or others who may be deemed material to the candidate's efforts", said Oliver Friedrichs of Symantec.

"The breach of a legitimate candidate's Web site would allow an attacker to have direct control over all content viewed by visitors to that site. This may allow for the posting of misinformation, or worse, the deployment of malicious code to unsecured visitors", he continued.

And just think that these sites are like any other, a hacker could take advantage of anything. They could use adware, spyware, XSS, phishing, bot-type viruses and who knows what else? There are a lot of possibilities and a large public to target as well, which means they won't miss out on this opportunity. As usual, deploying security software and being careful is advised!

TAGS:

hackers | elections | votes | sites

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