Vulnerability Management

Kid hackers make child’s play of state voting systems in Def Con Voting Village

Hacking some voting equipment is evidently child's play, at least that was the result of a program run during Def Con's Voting Village when 35 kids were able to access replicas of six secretary of state websites, one within just 10 minutes. The event, which was part of the Voting Village overall election machine hacking, had 39 children between six and 17 years old attack replicas of six secretary of state websites with 35 doing so successfully. All six states in question were of six historical swing states, according to the VotingVillageDC twitter page. One contestant, 11-year-old Emmett Brewer, took only 10 minutes to access the fake Florida secretary of state site, according to USA Today. The replica sites were created by Wickr and Wall of Sheep Village.  The participants tampered with vote tallies, party and candidate names and total vote counts. In one case the number of votes was changed to 12 billion and a candidates name replace with Bob Da Builder. The National Association of Secretaries of State and one election machine manufacturer decried all the work being done in the Voting Village saying the results could not be replicated in a real-world setting and so were not indicative of true voting machine problems. 

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