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Def Con 26 Voting Village Sees an 11-Year-Old Crack a Voting Machine

posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 14 2018, @02:47PM   
from the starting-to-get-attention-now dept.

canopic jug writes:

Another item from Def Con 26, which ended the other day, an 11-year-old was easily able to change tallies on real electronic voting equipment within minutes. These machines are designed not to leave any evidence when tampering happens so it was useful that there were many witnesses present for her demo.

Election hackers [sic] have spent years trying to bring attention to flaws in election equipment. But with the world finally watching at DEFCON, the world's largest hacker conference, they have a new struggle: pointing out flaws without causing the public to doubt that their vote will count.

This weekend saw the 26th annual DEFCON gathering. It was the second time the convention had featured a Voting Village, where organizers set up decommissioned election equipment and watch hackers [sic] find creative and alarming ways to break in. Last year, conference attendees found new vulnerabilities for all five voting machines and a single e-poll book of registered voters over the course of the weekend, catching the attention of both senators introducing legislation and the general public. This year's Voting Village was bigger in every way, with equipment ranging from voting machines to tabulators to smart card readers, all currently in use in the US.

In a room set aside for kid hackers [sic], an 11-year-old girl hacked a replica of the Florida secretary of state's website within 10 minutes — and changed the results.

Earlier on SN:
Georgia Defends Voting System Despite 243-Percent Turnout in One Precinct
South Carolina's 13k Electronic Voting Machines Vulnerable, Unreliable
Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States

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Original Submission

• So, 2 guys and Al Gore created the Internet. (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:51PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 14 2018, @08:51PM (#721530)

  From your link:

  • Here is the definitive statement on Gore's involvement in "inventing" the Internet, from the guys who really did

    ORLY?

  • No one person or even small group of persons exclusively "invented" the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community.

  • Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s.

  • As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an "Interagency Network."

  • Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driven operation.

    It should be noted that there were already other commercial networking solutions to large-scale networking; government did what it does worst: Chooses winners and losers. Most of the modern Internet actually came from private enterprise shoehorning protocols together to make things work, and to expand capabilities. Look at the protocol stack of networking equipment—it's bonkers.

  • There are many factors that have contributed to the Internet's rapid growth since the later 1980s, not the least of which has been political support for its privatization

  So, a multi-decade, multi-organization effort was spotted as being interesting by one particular government official decades after the major work of networking began. Oh, and these 2 guys got some money from taxpayers. Wow.

  Parent