In January, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson announced: “Given the vital role elections play in this country, it is clear that certain systems and assets of election infrastructure meet the definition of critical infrastructure, in fact and in law.”
Originally published August 19, 2017: With this one statement, the nation’s election infrastructure was firmly placed for the first time on equal footing with other parts of America’s critical infrastructure such as emergency services, nuclear reactors, and water systems. While this was a welcome designation, events that unfolded in late July demonstrated just how vulnerable this infrastructure really is.
With the ongoing controversy surrounding the integrity of our nation’s voting systems, hackers at the 25th annual DEF CON computer security conference held late last month in Las Vegas were given an unprecedented opportunity to find and exploit possible vulnerabilities in a variety of different voting systems supplied by organizers of the show.
These machines, from leading vendors such as Diebold, Sequoia, and Winvote, have been commonly used in previous elections held throughout the country. The results were not encouraging. Of the 30 voting machines that were used for this demonstration, every single system was shown to have vulnerabilities — and some of these machines were hacked in about half an hour.
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