Nothing ventured, nothing gained

An attacker who gets physical access to a Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus.

The latest findings on Diebold’s voting machine isn’t pretty. Physical access to a machine is all it takes to inject vote stealing code: the lock to side door containing the memory card can be picked, and the memory card can be replaced with evil code which can be loaded in the system. Check out the full research paper and the video demonstrating an attack.