Bender Wins An Election The Only Way Bender Should: By Stealing It

He’s unstoppable!

Bender from Futurama won an election to head the Washington, D.C., School Board. The city wanted to test their E-voting system, so they invited hackers to try to breach and manipulate the electronic voting machines. Professor Alex Halderman and two graduate students at the University of Michigan were the first to go all Crash Override up in that. They increased the security of the system to keep other hackers out — something the machines should have had in the first place — then appointed Bender the winner, had the final sign-off screen on the machines display the word owned, and programmed the machines to play the University of Michigan fight song.

It took two days for authorities to notice the machines had been hacked, and they only noticed after a tester said the system was secure but the music it was playing was annoying. Yep. Totally secure.

Now here’s the scariest part:

In the US, there are 33 states that have introduced some kind of electronic voting systems – and none of them are secure enough to resist a determined attacker said Dr. David Jefferson from Lawrence Livermore National Labs. […] Financial attacks by hackers are relatively easy to detect – because at some point money has to leave the system. But if an election is hacked then we may never know, because it’s a one-time action that typically isn’t checked after the results have been announced and officials elected. It will be decades before we have the technology to vote securely, Jefferson said, if indeed it is even possible. [TheRegister]

Listen, anybody who says we shouldn’t use E-voting systems and then exploit them to put Bender in office can just bite my shiny metal a$$. Bender for everything, ever. Next stop, the tippy top:

But is Bender ready for public office?

Well, he’s got the basics down.

[Sources: Mediaite, TheRegister, and Worth1000]

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