Professional hackers were able to successfully infiltrate a modern voting machine in about 90 minutes during DEF CON Friday.
The Las Vegas-based conference hosted a competition in which hackers were able to identify key vulnerabilities in the system within just a few minutes, according to the report from The Register.
“Without question, our voting systems are weak and susceptible. Thanks to the contributions of the hacker community today, we’ve uncovered even more about exactly how,” Managing Director of Cambridge Global Capital Jake Braun said about the results.
“The scary thing is we also know that our foreign adversaries — including Russia, North Korea, Iran — possess the capabilities to hack them too, in the process undermining principles of democracy and threatening our national security.”
The competition used voting machines from Diebold, Sequoia, and Winvote, voting machines obtained from eBay or from government auctions, according to the report.
The least secure machine was the Winvote-branded machine used in Virginia. It only took one minute and 40 seconds to gain remote access to the machine, enabling someone to wirelessly control the device from anywhere in the world.
A June report from Bloomberg News claimed that Russian hackers launched attacks on 39 state’s voting machines during the course of the 2016 presidential election.
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