This article in WaPo is both inspiring and downright frightening. These folks are expert and the Voting Village part of the convention is only 3 years old. And this year is being attended by lawmakers as well as the expert hackers.
'Please break things’: Hackers lay siege to voting systems to spot weaknesses in security
Armed with lock-pick kits to crack into locked hardware, Ethernet cables and inquiring minds, they had come for a rare chance to interrogate the machines that conduct U.S. democracy. By laying siege to electronic poll books and ballot printers, the friendly hackers aimed to expose weaknesses that could be exploited by less friendly hands looking to interfere in elections.
Wyden nodded along as Harri Hursti, the founder of Nordic Innovation Labs and one of the event’s organizers, explained that the almost all of the machines in the room were still used in elections across the United States, despite having well-known vulnerabilities that have been more or less ignored by the companies that sell them. Many had Internet connections, Hursti said, a weakness savvy attackers could abuse in several ways.
In three years since its inception, Def Con’s Voting Village — and the conference at large — has become a destination not only for hackers but also for lawmakers and members of the intelligence community trying to understand the flaws in the election system that allowed Russian hackers to intervene in the 2016 election and that could be exploited again in 2020.
Even the Pentagon, or something they’ve worked on was represented.
This year’s programming involved hacking voting equipment as well as panels with election officials and security experts, a demonstration of an $10 million experimental voting system from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and a “part speed-dating, part group therapy" session where state and local election officials gathered with hackers to hash out challenges of securing elections.
Looks like some of the voting machine makers don’t want to help or play.
A great article to not miss out on!
At the Voting Village, nestled in a ballroom in the sprawling Planet Hollywood convention center, hackers put the machines’ weaknesses on display with playful flourishes, overtaking one electronic poll book to play the first-person shooter game Doom on it, or leaving Nyan Cat, a Japanese meme, sailing across the screen of another made by VR Systems. Ahead of the 2016 election, Russian hackers installed malware on VR Systems’ company network, The Washington Post reported.