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Hacking into Supervisors of Elections Office

Posted at 6:55 PM, Jan 25, 2016
and last updated 2016-01-25 18:55:51-05

FORT MYERS, Fla. - Is the Supervisor of Elections computer system vulnerable to hackers?

Dan Sinclair, who is running against Sharon Harrington, says it is.

In a FOX 4 exclusive, Sinclair and his team show how they were able to infiltrate one of the Supervisor of Elections servers.

Using a structured query languange.injection, Sinclair and David Levin were able to gain immediate access to a server.

From there, they collected the passwords for everyone that works in the Supervisor of Elections office for Lee County.

Sinclair fears that back door into the system could create chaos during an election cycle.

"They could go in there and change the dates of elections, send people to the wrong place, they could change whose running for office. They could take candidates information down. There's all kinds of things they could do in there. It's pretty scary."

It sounds scary but when Four in Your Corner's Warren Wright asked the Supervisor of Elections office about it, their IT expert said there's no reason to worry.

Explaining, that particular server only contains historical data and the computer which tabulates election results is not connected to it.

But Sinclair says once you gain access to one server, its not a stretch to be able to infiltrate others.

"If that system is messed up, then how many of the other systems are not protected?" says Sinclair.

The supervisor of election's IT team states they take any type of data breach very seriously but in no way is the system truly vulnerable.

Yet, they did say they have removed or encrypted all those passwords for that one server.