Last year, Defcon’s Voting Village made headlines for uncovering massive security issues in America’s electronic voting machines. Unsurprisingly, voting-machine makers are working to prevent a repeat performance at this year’s show. According to Voting Village organizers, they’re having a tough time getting their hands on machines for white-hat hackers to test at the next Defcon event in Las Vegas (held in August). That’s because voting-machine makers are scrambling to get the machines off eBay and keep them out of the hands of the “good guy” hackers. Village co-organizer Harri Hursti told attendees at the Shmoocon hacking conference this month they were having a hard time preparing for this year’s show, in part because voting machine manufacturers sent threatening letters to eBay resellers. The intimidating missives told auctioneers that selling the machines is illegal — which is false.
Electronic voting-machine manufacturers — and anyone with a stake in keeping their flaws secret — have oodles of reasons to prevent Defcon’s Voting Village from having a repeat performance of last year’s (perfectly legal) mass hacking of e-vote boxes.
… So it’s no wonder voting machine makers are keen to get their gear off eBay and keep it out of the hands of white-hat hackers equally keen to expose their collective security failings.
The Defcon Voting Village crew seems to be taking it as you’d expect — like a challenge. Harri Hursti is definitely having trouble, but said it scored at least one machine from “an e-cycling company [that] had bought 1,300 voting machines, which it acquired when the ceiling of the warehouse in which they were being stored collapsed.”
Hursti told press, “We found the company had already sold 400 of the machines, in some cases back to counties for voting duties.” So, you know. This is fine.
Full Article: Voting-machine makers are already worried about Defcon.