Several election watch dog groups have sent an advisory to election officials warning them about a problem with Premier Election Solutions' vote tabulating software that could cause the system to lose votes.

Premier (formerly called Diebold Election Systems) disclosed the problem in August after officials in Butler County, Ohio, discovered that 150 votes were dropped from a memory card during the state's March primary. Ten other Ohio counties discovered their system had dropped votes as well when vote totals on the memory card were uploaded to a county server. The problem occurred when officials tried to upload multiple memory cards at once.

All of the votes were recovered, but Ohio officials had to expend considerable time and energy to retrieve them and make sure all were accounted for.

The flaw is in Premier's Global Election Management System (GEMS), which is used in at least 31 states. GEMS software sits on a computer system at a county's election headquarters and is used to tabulate votes cast on both touchscreen voting machines and optical-scan machines. Premier said the flaw was in versions 1.20.2 and earlier of the software, though other versions may be affected as well.

Premier initially blamed the problem on anti-virus software that Ohio counties installed on their servers. But that explanation, published last May in an advisory sent to election officials, was met with much skepticism by voting activists and computer experts.

On August 19, after Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner filed a suit against Premier to force the company to pay damages for the lost-vote incident, the company released a second advisory acknowledging that the problem was its software (.pdf). In the advisory, the company stated that the issue was a "sharing violation" problem.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 14:14

Many companies are trying to prevent leakage of personal and classified information by building independent networks isolated from the Internet, as viruses are often transmitted via files attached to e-mail or those on the Internet. However, USB drives are often used on unspecified computers, so viruses can immediately spread.

Antivirus software maker Trend Micro Inc. has found that reported computer virus infections via USB flash memory drives more than doubled in September, Jiji Press learned.

Infections in the month with the Otorun worm, which propagates via removal drives such as USB drives, surged 140 percent from the previous month to 347 cases, Trend Micro said in a monthly survey report.

The company's monthly reports showed that viruses transmitted via USB drives began to rapidly increase in February, with the number of Otorun infections in January-June reaching 517, the most popular to far exceed 201 cases of the Agent, Trend Micro said.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:33