The campaign of French presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen has asked police to investigate a data breach at French National Front party headquarters (source). According to media reports, a computer ‘hacker’ stole a list of French officials who had tentatively agreed to back Le Pen. Le Pen believes this purported attack to be part of a coordinated effort to deter elected French officials from backing his campaign and prevent him from acquiring the necessary 500 official sponsors required to run for president.
Unfortunately, the attack on the Le Pen campaign is merely the latest example of using information warfare to influence democratic elections. During the 2006 election cycle, Senator Joseph Liberman’s website www.joe2006.com was shut down via an alleged denial of service (DoS) attack. Lieberman campaign manager Sean Smith called the attack a “dirty trick.” The attack prevented primary voters from studying Lieberman’s stance on campaign issues, looking for the nearest polling places. Additionally, the attack disabled the Lieberman campaign email service and thusly prevented the campaign from communicating with its staff and volunteers.
The espionage conducted against the Le Pen campaign and the denial of service against the Lieberman campaign pale in comparison to the potential for attacks against electronic voting systems currently in use. Researchers from Princeton University led by Dr. Ed Felten have demonstrated that Diebold electronic voting systems, in use in 37 US states for general elections (source), are extremely susceptible to attack. According to the research conducted by Felten and his team “an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code.” The attacker could design the installed malicious code to automatically spread to other voting machines and alter voting records on the affected machines and ultimately change the outcome of an election.
These documented attacks raise serious concerns about the future security of democratic elections around the world. The attacks discussed above give rise to the possibility that domestic or even foreign agents could alter the outcome of elections in other countries. Therefore, rather than engaging in a potentially bloody coup, a domestic group or a nation-state could instead surreptitiously ‘hack the vote’ of its rival and install a government pliant to its wishes.