“It took less than a day for attendees at the DefCon hacking conference to find and exploit vulnerabilities in five different voting machine types,” USA Today reports.

“’The first ones were discovered within an hour and 30 minutes. And none of these vulnerabilities has ever been found before, they’ll all new”, said Harri Hursti, co-coordinator of the event.

A group of hackers at the DefCon computer security conference in Las Vegas attempted to (legally) break into a touch screen voting machine. The effort was part of a weekend-long Voting Machine Hacking Village at the conference aimed at raising awareness about vulnerabilities to the U.S. election system.

The hacking and related work was legal, hosted by the Voting Machine Hacking Village. “Its goal was to educate the computer security community about potential weaknesses of the voting systems used in U.S. elections and get them involved in fixing them,” said USA Today.

“By all accounts it worked.”

Source:
1. Hackers-defcon-conference-exploit-vulnerabilities-voting-machines

Questions to Consider

1. Why don’t security agencies enhance this type of activities to secure the American electoral system?

2. If technology advances, why don’t lawyers and judges specialize in electoral technology due to the discoveries made in these events?

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