In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, ProPublica.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by ProPublica.” You must link the word “ProPublica” to the original URL of the story. You are are free to republish it so long as you do the following: Thank you for your interest in republishing this story. Those questioning the technical details of the mock sites and whether their vulnerabilities were realistic are missing the point, he insisted. Jake Braun, the co-organizer of the event, defended the attention-grabbing way it was framed, saying the security issues of election websites haven’t gotten enough attention. “It would be lunacy to directly connect the election management system, of which the tabulation system is a part of, to the internet,” Franklin said. This information is kept separately and would not be affected if hackers got into sites that display vote totals. “When I learned that they were not using exact copies and pains hadn’t been taken to more properly replicate the underlying infrastructure, I was definitely saddened,” Franklin said.įranklin and David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, also pointed out that while state election websites report voting results, they do not actually tabulate votes. Josh Franklin, an elections expert formerly at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a speaker at Def Con, called the websites “fake.” Get the latest news from ProPublica every afternoon. In a website published before r00tz Asylum, the youth section of Def Con, organizers indicated that students would attempt to hack exact duplicates of state election websites, referring to them as “replicas” or “exact clones.” (The language was scaled back after the conference to simply say “clones.”) The Daily Digest He came to the event because voting “has been such a hot topic after the presidential election,” he said.Headlines from Def Con, a hacking conference held this month in Las Vegas, might have left some thinking that infiltrating state election websites and affecting the 2018 midterm results would be child’s play.Īrticles reported that teenage hackers at the event were able to “crash the upcoming midterm elections” and that it had taken “an 11-year-old hacker just 10 minutes to change election results.” A first-person account by a 17-year-old in Politico Magazine described how he shut down a website that would tally votes in November, “bringing the election to a screeching halt.”īut now, elections experts are raising concerns that misunderstandings about the event - many of them stoked by its organizers - have left people with a distorted sense of its implications. It’s not even as strongly protected as a PC,” said Brandon Pfeifer, a security expert who works on embedded aviation systems in Kansas City. “This software just isn’t up to modern standards. elections and get them involved in fixing them. Its goal was to educate the computer security community about potential weaknesses of the voting systems used in U.S. The Voting Machine Hacking Village event at the 25th annual DefCon computer security conference ran from Friday to Sunday. One group even managed to rick-roll a touch screen voting machine, getting it to run Rick Astley’s song “Never Gonna Give You Up,” from 1987. And none of these vulnerabilities has ever been found before, they’ll all new,” said Harri Hursti, co- coordinator of the event. “The first ones were discovered within an hour and 30 minutes. It took less than a day for attendees at the DefCon hacking conference to find and exploit vulnerabilities in five different voting machine types. LAS VEGAS – Hackers 5, voting machines 0.
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