Following the recent declaration by the U.S. National Security Agency that Russian hackers tried to infiltrate the electronic voting machines used in the last U.S. presidential election, many people are calling for a lot of things especially for the electronic voting machines to be scrapped. Although the Russians did not succeed, more questions are still left on the table. U.S. senators looking for answers have constituted a committee and is hoping to pass a bipartisan bill called the Securing America’s Voting Equipment (SAVE) Act. The bill will enlist help from the Department of Homeland Security to organize an event like the one held at the DEFCON hackers conference in July, themed the “Voting Machine Hacking Village.”
That DEFCON event exposed vulnerabilities in the electronic voting machines used in the last U.S. election. Hackers took less than two hours to break into the 25 voting machines that were brought to the DEFCON conference, and the first machine was penetrated in minutes. The results of the findings released at an event at the Atlantic Council in October was one of the key provocations for the US senators to introduce the SAVE bill.
Interestingly, some of the significant findings after the alleged Russian breach were centered on the use of foreign materials in the production of these voting machines. Hackers at the DEFCON event pointed to the possibility of having malware embedded into the hardware and software along the entire supply and distribution chain. It was also believed that hackers could have tampered with voters’ registration on the touch screen voting machines.
Called the “Cooperative Hack the Election Program”, the initiative mirrors the bug bounty programs previously ran by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) where friendly hackers were invited to hack the Pentagon, Army and Air Force. The program is set to swing into motion one year after the bill is in play.
Full Article: Hackers to Help Make Voting Machines Safe Again – CPO Magazine.