Election Commission Website Hacked in DuPage County

[orleans]

i'm getting a headache--i just found this newsy bit tonight:

DuPage election Web site hacked

By Joseph Sjostrom
Tribune staff reporter

October 27, 2006, 8:21 PM CDT

Michael Funtera, an academic adviser at Roosevelt University, was searching the DuPage County Election Commission's Web site Thursday morning when he came upon a line that stopped him cold.

Under the list of qualifications for potential voters, the site read: "You may not be a homosexual."

"I was shocked," said Funtera, of Warrenville. "I kept thinking of reasons why it might be correct, like if you're openly homosexual you can't serve in the Army and that's related to ... to nothing.

"So I was showing it to people at work and asking them, 'This is wrong, right?'"

A colleague called the commission, alerting them to the problem. As it turned out, a hacker broke into the site not once, but twice this week.

After the "homosexual" phrase was removed, officials took steps that they thought would prevent further hacking, commission Director Robert Saar said. Later Thursday or early Friday, however, a hacker added a new line to the list of qualifications: "Your grandfather must have voted."

That too was removed.

"These acts are meant to scare and incite voters, and that's a very serious thing," Saar said. "Any breach of a government system is a serious thing."

On Friday, the county's computer experts were trying to learn how the hacker got into the site; Saar said registered voters and those who participate in the Nov. 7 election don't need to worry.

The intrusion didn't affect voter registration files, which are protected by additional firewalls, or the commission's vote-counting system, which is not connected to the Internet or to any other computer, he said.

The hacked lines were a few links from the site's main page and would be easy to miss unless a person was navigating the "voter information" portion. Funtera said he saw it as he was searching for his polling place.

The hacker added the lines to a list of qualifications on "how to register" that included such real requirements as "You must be a United States citizen," "You must be at least 18 years old on or before the next election" and "You must not be convicted and in jail."

Saar said that while technical experts were trying to "reverse engineer" the hack to determine its source, the commission's lawyer was attempting to determine what, if any, laws the hacker had broken. Jacob Furst, an Internet security expert and associate professor at DePaul University, said Internet sites are vulnerable to hacking because accessibility to the public is part of their nature.

"Web site defacement is the most common kind of hacking," he said, "And government sites are the most common target because the hackers want people to distrust the government."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/custom/newsroom/chi-061027hacker,1,794794,print.story?coll=chi-news-hed

GRRRRR