Sarong-clad anti-coal hippies have been marked as a chief threat to online voting at the election scheduled to take place in 2015 in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW). The protestors are identified as a threat in a report penned by CSC for the NSW government. The Reg has seen a copy of the report, which suggests developers feared protesting farmers and fire fighters could launch an attack against New South Wales’ iVote online ballot system in objection to various coal mining projects across the state. “Anti-coal lobby groups could lead to the targeting of the SGE (state government election) in 2015,” the document read. The document also outlines scenarios in which protestors could launch denial of service attacks, knocking out the ability for 250,000 remote and blind users to vote online.
The protesters were one of a dozen threat actors who could target e-voting in Australia. The report compiled by security vendor CSC also separately named Pyongyang and Beijing -backed hackers along with terror groups Al Qaeda and Al Islamiah as albeit unlikely threats, .
More likely however was that a cunning sysadmin at iVote developer Scytl would have planted a backdoor in the platform.
iVote collected 46,864 votes in the 2011 NSW state election by remote and disabled voters over phone and internet. It is expected to tally a quarter of a million ballots in the upcoming election.
Full Article: Anti-coal protestors rated top threat to Australian e-voting • The Register.