Hackers ferret out election-rigging bugs

LAS VEGAS: Def Con, one of the world’s largest hacker conventions, will serve as a laboratory for breaking into voting machines this week, extending its efforts to identify potential security flaws in technology that may be used in the November US elections.

The three-day “Voting Village”, which opened in Las Vegas yesterday, also aims to expose vulnerabilities in devices such as digital poll books and memory-card readers.

Def Con held its first voting village last year after US intelligence agencies concluded the Russian government used hacking in its attempt to support Donald Trump’s 2016 candidacy for president. Moscow has denied the allegations.

Organisers have returned ahead of the November elections, in which Democrats hope to take control of the US House of Representatives. Trump’s national security team last week warned that Russia had launched “pervasive” efforts to interfere in the elections.

“These vulnerabilities that will be identified over the course of the next three days would, in an actual election, cause mass chaos,” said Jake Braun, one of the village’s organisers.

“They need to be identified and addressed, regardless of the environment in which they are found.”

Participants will have a chance to hack into more than five types of voting machines from manufacturers including Elections Systems & Software and Dominion Voting.

Last year a Danish researcher figured out how to take control of a touch-screen voting system used through 2014 in a remote hack that organisers said could work from up to 300m away.

A group representing US secretaries of state lauded the goal of bolstering election security, but warned that the findings might be skewed.

“It utilises a pseudo environment which in no way replicates state election systems, networks or physical security,” the National Association of Secretaries of State said in a statement. Reuters/ African News Agency (ANA)