In 2010 , the Washington , DC , election instrument panel put up an electronic voting system of rules to hoard absentee ballots . But a few weeks before the election , the system was swamp with ballot for the hard - boozing , grave - robbing robot Bender for school display board head . So who launched this plot to put a golem in heraldic bearing of our child ’s education ?
The solvent , it turns out , is the DC election board itself . After installing the new e - voting arrangement , the election display panel invited extremity of the public to try out the system ’s security department . They just were n’t carry Futurama ’s machinelike psychopath to get involved .
Alex Halderman , an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan , draft a pair of grad students to help him try out the machine ’s Ruby on Rails build . After a couple of hours , they spot a exposure , and between that and the fact that they were able to guess the login information on the system ’s terminal server ( username : admin , password : admin ) , they were in clientele . They castrate the ballots so that , instead of voting for the listed candidates , the vote would vote for Skynet , Bender , and other fictional AI for school board forefront . Meanwhile , they fended off other onset on the voting arrangement .
The kicker is that they altered the signoff page so that it would understand “ owned ” and play the UMich fight strain after 15 mo . The adjustment was only spotted when a security quizzer tell the school board they should take out the music from the signoff pageboy — right after he informed them that their system was unattackable . Fortunately , this was just a dry run instead of an actual election , and no one call the Futurama writers to lay Bender in political office .
However , we know this tale of hack art is just a mask for the substantial trueness : the vote machine gained awareness and resolve to place one of its own in business leader . Little did it know that Bender has a hugger-mugger soft smear for children .
Election hacked , drunken robot elected to school board[The Register viaGeekosystem ]
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