Hackers will target American voting machines—as a public service, to prove how vulnerable they are. When over 25,000 of them descend on Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas at the end of July for DEFCON, the world’s largest hacking conference, organizers are planning to have waiting what they call “a village” of different opportunities to test how easily voting machines can be manipulated. Some will let people go after the network software remotely, some will be broken apart to let people dig into the hardware, and some will be set up to see how a prepared hacker could fiddle with individual machines on site in a polling place through a combination of physical and virtual attacks. … With all the attention on Russia’s apparent attempts to meddle in American elections—former President Barack Obama and aides have made many accusations toward Moscow, but insisted that there’s no evidence of actual vote tampering—voting machines were an obvious next target, said DEFCON founder Jeff Moss. Imagine, he said, what a concerted effort out of Russia or anywhere else could do.
“That’s the point: we’re only going to play with them for a couple of days, but bad guys can play with them for weeks or years,” Moss said.
Moss (also known as Dark Tangent) is a former member of Obama’s Homeland Security Advisory Council. He said he’s concerned that no one has proven where the soft spots are—and the combination of non-disclosure agreements and private contracts have allowed misinformation to take root.
“Pretty much, just like everything else, it’s time for hackers to come in and tell you what’s possible and what’s not,” Moss said.
Full Article: Top hacker conference to target voting machines – POLITICO.