#rsrh QotD, Oh, Dear God That’s Embarrassing Edition.

So in 2010 the Washington, DC school board challenged hackers to get into their absentee voting system…

Yeah, you, I, and Glenn Reynolds know where this is going.

Anyway, a team from the University of Michigan broke in, replaced all the votes with write-ins for “Bender Bending Rodríguez” (yes, the robot), accessed critical files that would have permitted social engineering and/or wholesale voting fraud, got into the general network to use the security cameras, fended off several other hacking attacks both foreign and domestic, tagged the site with an “Owned!” gif, and programmed the site to play the UofM fight song.  In case you were wondering, this was not a particularly subtle finishing move:

And yet…

Despite all this, the system administrators did not notice anything strange until two days later.

Ah, Dizzy City.  I’d recommend that the portions of it not on the Federal Mall be given back to Maryland and Virginia, except that neither state would take them except at gunpoint.

7 thoughts on “#rsrh QotD, Oh, Dear God That’s Embarrassing Edition.”

  1. But hey, these folks will promise to do much better when they’re in charge of our healthcare records.

  2. Um, Go Blue? (Yes, that is the “official” Hail to the Victors”. A small men’s choir doing the vocals is not the same as 116K football fans, but this version is on a CD.)

  3. …and yet again, clueless appears were you least expect it.Inside Government, where all is right and good. And smart………
    Query: is the CIO of DC a graduate of their school system?
    WhoDaThunkIT?

Comments are closed.