Video: Nation’s Top Hackers at DEF CON Conference Once Again Easily Breach U.S. Voting Machines
Yet Republicans Continue to Ignore This Crisis Year After Year
Where did this come from? Since when did the far-left legacy media start reporting on election fraud?
Politico on Tuesday broke the news that “the nation’s best hackers” were able to break into voting machines.
Over the weekend, some of the world’s top hackers convened in Las Vegas for the annual DEF CON conference, specifically at the Voting Village event, to probe and expose vulnerabilities in voting machines set to be used in the upcoming November election.
From Friday through Sunday, hackers at Voting Village tested various voting machines and related equipment, attempting to bypass security measures.
Meanwhile, election officials discussed misinformation and disinformation threats. The findings from this year’s event will be detailed in a forthcoming report by the organizers.
Harri Hursti, co-founder of Voting Village, noted that the list of vulnerabilities found was extensive but consistent with previous years.
“There’s so much basic stuff that should be happening and is not happening, so yes I’m worried about things not being fixed, but they haven’t been fixed for a long time, and I’m also angry about it,” Hursti told Politico.
Scott Algeier, executive director of the Information Technology-Information Sharing and Analysis Center (IT-ISAC), emphasized that fixing vulnerabilities is not a quick process: “Even if you find a vulnerability next week in a piece of modern equipment that’s deployed in the field, there’s a challenge in getting the patch and getting the fix out to the state and local elections officials and onto the equipment before the November election.”
“It’s not a 90-day fix, It’s not a Microsoft every Tuesday, issue your patch and everything works fine. It’s a pretty complicated process,” he added.
Screenshot: Politico
According to Politico:
Some of the best hackers in the world gathered in Las Vegas over the weekend to try to break into voting machines that will be used in this year’s election — all with an eye to helping officials identify and fix vulnerabilities.
The problem? Their findings will likely come too late to make any fixes before Nov. 5.
In one sense, it’s the normal course of events: Every August, hackers at the DEF CON conference find security gaps in voting equipment, and every year the long and complex process of fixing them means nothing is implemented until the next electoral cycle.
But Election Day security is under particular scrutiny in 2024. That’s both because of increasing worries that foreign adversaries will figure out how to breach machines, and because President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of widespread fraud in 2020 undermined confidence in the vote among his supporters.
As a result, many in the election security community are bemoaning the fact that no system has been developed to roll out fixes faster and worrying that the security gaps that get identified this year will provide fodder for those who may want to question the results.
This is not the first time Def Con hackers were able to penetrate vulnerable voting machines used in the US today.
In July 2017, the DEF CON hackers made quick work of the voting machines. Hackers were given the rare chance to crack into US voting machines. It took one person just 90 minutes to hack in and vote remotely on one of the machines.
Here’s another detailed video from 2017:
In 2019, at the DEF CON conference in Las Vegas, NBC News’ technology correspondent Jacob Ward provided an in-depth look at how easily hackers can exploit vulnerabilities in voting systems.
This is not the first time we have heard about election machine vulnerabilities.
In 2023, University of Michigan Professor of Computer Science and Engineering J. Halderman, revealed in a Georgia courtroom that Dominion Voting Systems were vulnerable to hacks. His report confirmed that votes can be altered in the Dominion voting machines. In fact, the report reveals that the Dominion software is vulnerable and can be hacked.
Professor Halderman wrote in his report:
We discovered vulnerabilities in nearly every part of the system that is exposed to potential attackers. The most critical problem we found is an arbitrary-code-execution vulnerability that can be exploited to spread malware from a county’s central election management system (EMS) to every BMD in the jurisdiction. This makes it possible to attack the BMDs at scale, over a wide area, without needing physical access to any of them.
Our report explains how attackers could exploit the flaws we found to change votes or potentially even affect election outcomes in Georgia.
The Secretary of State in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, announced in 2023 that he would not fix the vulnerabilities before the 2024 election.
Update: 20+ leading experts in cybersecurity and elections just wrote to @MITREcorp CEO Jason Providakes urging him to retract MITRE's dangerously mistaken report.https://t.co/iKzuP1vhRs
— J. Alex Halderman (@jhalderm) June 16, 2023
Signers include @RonRivest @schneierblog @matthew_d_green @ejsebes @ErrataRob @philipbstark
Dr. Halderman revealed that the Dominion machines were so vulnerable that he was able to hack into one of the machines in the courtroom with a pen!
The Gateway Pundit has published dozens of reports like this over the past decade. Unfortunately, nothing ever changes. Republicans turn their back and walk away. And Americans continue to use vulnerable voting machines in election after election.
