Electronic voting firm says hacker broke in

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

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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