Hackers Eviscerate Election Tech Security…Who’s Surprised?

The post Hackers Eviscerate Election Tech Security…Who’s Surprised? appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

Over the past two days, all major US news outlets breathlessly reported that hackers in Las Vegas needed little time to expose the security flaws of several types of voting machines this weekend. While it is certainly nice to see the mainstream media cover election integrity issues more than once every four years, anybody following the topic, as WhoWhatWhy routinely does, was hardly surprised that the hackers were so successful.

How do we know? Because, in anticipation of what happened at the DEF CON hacking conference, WhoWhatWhy spoke to many of the leading election integrity experts to get their thoughts on the event.

Most of them expressed hope that the hackers would raise much-needed awareness of the vulnerabilities of US voting machines.

Some of the experts we spoke to ahead of the event expressed concerns that, should the hackers fail to breach the machines, it would give people a false sense of security. It turns out that they did not have to worry about that — at all.

“…all of the studied systems possess critical security failures that render their technical controls insufficient to guarantee a trustworthy election.”

Hackers wasted no time decimating voting-machine security when they were invited to take a swing at more than 30 “real voting machines, used in past elections and to be used in future elections” obtained by the event’s organizers for the convention’s inaugural “Voting Machine Hacking Village.”

Doug Kellner, co-chair of the New York State election board, lauded DEF CON’s “commendable” effort.

“We can never be certain that our systems are completely secure,” Kellner told WhoWhatWhy. “If hackers expose vulnerabilities, that is a positive development that can motivate election officials to address those issues.”

Some election officials went one step further, travelling to DEF CON “to hack the very machines they use in their jurisdictions to run elections,” according to Harri Hursti, the Finnish cybersecurity expert who helped spawn the Voting Village.  

Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from voting machine (subfinitum / Flickr – CC BY 2.0).