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Children Show it Kid’s Play in Compromising Election Websites


A demonstration by hackers of Def Con conference shows the manner in which voting machines can be easily hacked. Evidently, adults in the Voting Village of the conference were provided an opportunity for hijacking voting devices. To further the activity, Def Con, in 2018, as well allowed children of 8-16-yrs-old do the same exercise for which it floated copycat sites of election websites of states. The event, which r00tz Asylum put on and which the Democratic National Committee and the University of Chicago supported, revealed simply with what ease the websites in question could be attacked.

In all 39 kids 6-17-yrs-old attempted the hacks on first day as they tried penetrating the replicas of election outcome sites of the government which Brian Markus ex-technology advisor in the White House developed. There were deliberately-created software vulnerabilities in the websites for exploitation; vulnerabilities such as classic coding flaws and SQL injection loopholes. Theregister.co.uk posted this, August 13, 2018.

Except for 4 kids, all were able in leveraging the embedded security flaws in just 3-hrs that covered the contest time. Therefore, it's evident how easy it's for issuing commands to a website which's short of fundamental secure programming exercises as well as lack the latest patches. Hence, it calls for urgent attention by people in-charge of websites that provide election information.

While carrying out the hacks, the kids managed altering vote tallies to count 12bn, while change the candidates' and their parties' names.

It was still easy to penetrate the Express Poll 5000 devices of Diebold because of their memory cards easily obtainable that could be swiped while voting, as also their supervisor passcodes within ordinary text. Hackers had the opportunity for physically accessing the said cards and also tampering with them. The memory cards contain voters' unencrypted personal records such as driver's license details, home addresses and social security numbers.

Meanwhile, on August 8, senators of U.S Republican party allotted $250 million as urgent funding for election security that Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) proposed and Jake Braun co-founder of Hacking Village said the amount was too little considering whether the November voting was almost secured.

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