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The Richmond, Virginia, website that tells people where to vote and publishes election results runs on a 17-year-old operating system. Software used by election-related sites in Johnston County, North Carolina, and the town of Barnstable, Massachusetts, had reached its expiration date, making security updates no longer available.
These aging systems reflect a larger problem: A ProPublica investigation found that at least 50 election-related websites in counties and towns voting on Super Tuesday — accounting for nearly 2 million voters — were particularly vulnerable to cyberattack. The sites, where people can find out how to register to vote, where to cast ballots and who won the election, had security issues such as outdated software, poor encryption and systems encumbered with unneeded computer programs. None of the localities contacted by ProPublica said that their sites had been disrupted by cyberattacks.
ProPublica also spotted files that should have been kept hidden because, when identified, they could give hackers a roadmap to the computer system’s weaknesses. Some election websites shared the same computer server with many other local government sites, magnifying the potential repercussions of an attack. “Shared hosting environments are rarely appropriate for critical infrastructure,” researchers Bob Rudis and Tod Beardsley of the security firm Rapid7 wrote in a February report for ProPublica.
At a time when cybersecurity concerns have come to the forefront of American elections, ProPublica’s findings reveal the frailty of some local computer networks. Fake Election Day information could disenfranchise voters by sending them to the wrong polling place. Tainted results could stall a campaign, since primary wins drive momentum wit ..
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