Contest To Hack Brazilian Voting Machines 101
An anonymous reader writes "Brazilian elections went electronic many years ago, with very fast results but a few complaints from losers, of course. Next month, 10 teams that accepted the challenge will have access to hardware and software (Google translation; original in Portuguese) for the amount of time they requested (from one hour to four days). Some will try to break the vote's secrecy and some will try to throw in malicious code to change the entered votes without leaving traces."
Little bit more info... (Score:3, Informative)
for those who do not RTFA.
The teams can bring any software or equipment they want to try and break the machines' security.
And there is even a bounty of a little more than USD$2000,00 paid by the government to the team that gets closer to the goal.
Re:Why is electronic voting so "popular"? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually the puzzling thing to me is why is electronic voting so "popular". Why do the people in charge keep promoting it?
Seriously?
Can't speak to Brazil specifically, but the "popularity" of electronic voting, or more correctly, the push to use electronic voting systems to deal with the problems of manual methods, can be summed in two words: hanging chad [wikipedia.org].
Those two words, in turn, gave rise to another infamous two words: Bush v. Gore [wikipedia.org].
The aftermath, described here [wikipedia.org], included the passage of the Help America Vote Act [wikipedia.org] which, among other things, funded the purchase of electronic voting systems.
The rest happened in your state capitol.
If you don't reside in the US, you can be sure that your own elected representatives took note of what happened.