Organizers of the long-running DEFCON hacking conference have teamed with a variety of groups, including the National Governors Association, on an initiative to boost electoral security. The new coalition comes on the heels of a new report highlighting how insecure many voting machines really are. The DEFCON hacking conference, which has existed in one form or another for nearly a quarter century, is getting into the election security business—with the help of a number of associations and nonprofits. A September report [PDF] outlines the results of the first-ever “Voting Machine Hacking Village,” held at the DEFCON conference in Las Vegas last summer. The exercise revealed significant vulnerabilities in digital voting machines and in the ways they’re used to tally votes. And this week it led to the announcement of a coalition on election security that includes the National Governors Association, the Atlantic Council, the Center for Internet Security, and a variety of academic groups, among others.
In the Voting Village experiment, DEFCON attendees were given uncontrolled access to 25 different models of voting machines, some of which have been in use since the 1990s. According to the report, it didn’t take long to break them.
“The results were sobering. By the end of the conference, every piece of equipment in the Voting Village was effectively breached in some manner,” the report, written by former NATO Ambassador Douglas E. Lute, states. “Participants with little prior knowledge and only limited tools and resources were quite capable of undermining the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of these systems.”
Full Article: How DEFCON Turned an Event Into a Major Initiative: Associations Now.