Blogocentric Formulations

This Just In - August 10

Hackers at convention test voting systems for bugs  
Written as part of "This Just In..."   for "Blog Harbor from The Talent Pond" 

I'm fascinated by the concept of "white hat" hackers. While black hats seek to hack for personal gain (stealing credit card information to buy things, stealing personal information to sell, etc.), white hats are "ethical hackers" who seek to use their skills to positive ends (working with a company or agency to point out vulnerabilities in their security, etc.). I've read a couple books by Kevin Mitnick over the years (if your interested in hacking and haven't read Ghost in the Wires yet, I highly recommend it), and think it's really interesting to see these savvy techno-wizards using their skills to help make things better rather than tearing them down or gaining personally. A lot of white hats happen to be former black hats who through altruism or a plea agreement, have decided to work for the other side.

I didn't even realize DefCon was a thing, but I'm glad they have white hats working on figuring out potential vulnerabilities in our electronic voting systems. It's kind of a double-edged sword, though, because while you may learn about vulnerabilities that need to be fixed, you also realize how easy your security was to beat in the first place and can sometimes make a target out of you by those looking to flex their muscles and show off. Remember Todd Davis, the LifeLock CEO guy? After he participated in an ad campaign where he posted his real Social Security Number for the world to see and claiming their service's identity theft protections were unbeatable... well, he had his identity stolen 13 times over the following year, mostly from hackers who just wanted to prove they could beat an unbeatable system. Never underestimate people's ability to rise to a challenge!

What's a little worrisome in this article are the ways in which the white hats were able to exploit voting systems. Especially the Danish researcher referenced in this article who just last year was able to take control of a touchscreen voting machine remotely from up to 1,000 feet away. I know that the whole paper ballot hanging chad thing was a big deal in the 2000 presidential election, but the idea of debating how thoroughly punched or marked a piece of paper is seems almost quaint compared to the idea that you could literally steal someone's vote by remotely operating their voting machine from a laptop in your car across the street.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with the voting machines in the 2018 midterm elections coming up in just a few short months. I don't know if they're going to have all this hacked voting machine stuff sorted out by then... but I do know that if they don't, I'm probably going to request a paper ballot. Our district has been singled out for being one of the swing districts where our incumbent Republican congressman has a fair shot at being ousted by his Democratic challenger, so this election is far too important to trust to a machine if it has a known security vulnerability that could be exploited.