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Tuesday, August 14th, 2018

An 11-year-old at hacking convention is able to hack and change Florida vote in 10 minutes

Author:     Walter Einenkel
Source:     Daily Kos
Publication Date:     Monday August 13, 2018 · 10:35 AM PDT
 Link: An 11-year-old at hacking convention is able to hack and change Florida vote in 10 minutes
Stephan:   We have endless billions to spend on the technologies of the military; why is it do you think that we can't develop a technology for safe voting that protects our democracy? Remember the story I ran in July about the hackers convention? Well, it was worse than originally reported. As this story describes America's current voting technology can be manipulated by an 11-year-old in 10 minutes. Given that our 2016 national election was almost certainly manipulated in several ways by Russia, what I would consider an act of war, how is that still possible?

Voting machines

The second annual DEFCON Voting Village took place over a weekend at the end of July in Las Vegas, during the 29th annual DEFCON security convention. Computer experts and hackers meet annually to discuss and show off the latest and greatest computer security systems and practices. The Voting Village allow hackers to work on various “in use” and “not in use” voting machines, and see if and how they can hack them. It has been known for some time that our computer voting across the country is woefully lacking in state-of-the-art security, mostly because of a lack of financing and upgrading of our elections system. There’s a lot of money in elections—just not in the machines that count the votes.

BuzzFeed News explains that a dummy election was held using the machines, and then hackers were given the chance to monkey with the results. The basic idea in hacking these machines is to offer up opportunities for improvements in security. If you know the vulnerabilities in your machines, you can hopefully fix those before […]

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