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.
Voting-machine hacking at Defcon isn’t new; the conference has been joyfully cracking voting machines since 2004. The problems with voting-machine security, and the industry’s unwillingness to acknowledge the problems discovered at Defcon, have ensured the voting machine hacking challenge has been coming back year after year.
Full Article: Voting-machine makers are already worried about Defcon.