Florida Election Servers Hacked Again

After state officials boasted about security improvements following a breach, a hacker once again breached the same voter record systems.

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Slideshow: 10 Massive Security Breaches
For the second time in a week, a hacker has broken into systems connected with voting in Florida, stolen data, and released it to the public.
The most recent breach occurred after Florida election officials had touted the security of their systems. Glad you cleaned things up, pretty secure now guys, said the hacker responsible for the attack--who goes by the name Abhaxas--in a
post to Pastebin
uploaded on Thursday. That post also contained data obtained during the second hack.
Via Twitter, Abhaxas said that hacking into the servers--using well-known and what would be
easy-to-close holes
--took him about 10 minutes. Furthermore, he said he had access to all 310 databases on the server, though only publicly released information from two of them.
Florida officials said that the data stolen during the first breach was from an election office system in Liberty County. After that breach, Tim Durham, the chief department supervisor of elections for Collier County, downplayed the potential impact on election results, saying that every vote generates a paper trail. Paper ballots are reviewed and compared with totals that are given per the voting machine and thats done at an open public meeting, he said, according to
Storify
. Likewise, another election official said that all vote tabulation was handled by a separate system, not breached during the attacks, that wasnt connected to any other systems.
Altering or tampering with election records is a third-degree felony in Florida. But the breach poses a pertinent question: Are electronic voting records so secure that an interested third party--perhaps even a foreign government--couldnt tamper with the results? The 2004 presidential election, of course, ultimately hinged on less than 400,000 votes cast in Florida.
Abhaxas made that point in the document that included information from the breached servers. Who still believes voting isnt rigged? If the United States Government cant even keep their ballot systems secure, why trust them at all? Fail! Furthermore, it sounds as if attackers wouldnt have to breach too many systems to create an impact. According to a Twitter post from Abhaxas, after some research, Ive found out 1 company manages all but 6 [counties] voting sites--hosted on the same server.
The public dump of Florida voting system information is the latest in a recent string of so-called hacktivist efforts, which wield hacking as a means to a political end. Recently, for example, hacktivist group Anonymous has been
launching distributed denial of service attacks
against Turkish government agencies websites, in protest against the countrys plans to begin filtering the countrys Internet access on August 22. (People in Turkey have also taken to the streets in protest.)
Likewise, as part of its 50-day hacking spree, LulzSec released a trove of sensitive information from the
Arizona Department of Public Safety
, in protest against the countrys immigration policies. Less than one month later, that department was
again hacked
by the LulzSec and Anonymous spin-off known as AntiSec.
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Florida Election Servers Hacked Again