Good morning! This week, we’re talking about Brazil’s reliable electronic voting system. How swine flu outbreaks in China are making meat a luxury product in Brazil. Has Donald Trump threatened Brazil on Twitter? How Brazilian markets performed. Also, what you should be looking out for this week—and the most important facts of the previous seven days.
How reliable is Brazil’s electronic voting system?
Last week, Brazil’s Electoral Justice system submitted the country’s electronic voting machines to the scrutiny of 25 IT experts, among them Federal Police marshals, professors, students, and coders. They ran 13 planned hacking attacks and, despite two “superficial vulnerabilities”—which weren’t enough to compromise the secrecy of the vote, nor defraud the count—the machines passed the test.
This was the fifth time IT experts have been asked to try to hack the machines. So far, no severe vulnerability has been found—with minor glitches having been corrected prior to previous elections. Next year, a new round of tests will be carried out, to check if the flaws have been corrected.
You shall not pass. The hackers were divided into seven groups, each trying to break the system in a different way. They were unable to:
- Change the ballots; ...