[ISN] Electronic voting firm says hacker broke in

From: InfoSec News (isn@private)
Date: Tue Dec 30 2003 - 07:30:17 PST

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    http://www.startribune.com/stories/789/4292347.html
    
    Ted Bridis 
    Associated Press 
    December 30, 2003 
    
    WASHINGTON, D.C. -- A company developing security technology for 
    electronic voting suffered an embarrassing hacker break-in that its 
    executives think was tied to the debate over the safety of casting 
    ballots online.
    
    VoteHere Inc. of Bellevue, Wash., confirmed Monday that U.S. officials 
    are investigating a break-in of its computers in October, when someone 
    roamed its internal computer network. The intruder accessed internal 
    documents and might have copied sensitive software blueprints that the 
    company eventually planned to disclose publicly.
    
    CEO Jim Adler said VoteHere was confident that it knew who its hacker 
    was and had turned over "megabytes of evidence" to the FBI and Secret 
    Service. It sealed the intruder's access from the Internet, he said.
    
    U.S. authorities confirmed the investigation but declined to comment 
    further.
    
    Adler would not identify the company's chief suspect but said he 
    thinks the person was linked to the debate over the security of 
    electronic voting. The same individual might be tied to the theft in 
    March of internal documents from Diebold Election Systems of Canton, 
    Ohio.
    
    "We caught the intruder, identified him by name. We know where he 
    lives," Adler said. "We think this is political. There have been 
    break-ins around election companies over the last several months, and 
    we think this is related."
    
    VoteHere, which is privately held, disclosed the federal investigation 
    to stress that the break-in did not affect the integrity of its voting 
    technology, Adler said. The company also wanted to pre-empt any 
    criticisms of electronic voting based on public disclosures of its 
    internal records.
    
    
    
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