The world’s largest annual hacker convention, DEFCON, held in America in mid-December, was attended by about 50 children aged 8 to 16 years old, and 11-year-old Emmett Brewer (his place of residence is not indicated) in less than 10 minutes was able to crack a copy the Florida electoral website and change the voting results found there.
Nico Sell of R00tz Asylum, a nonprofit that teaches children how to become hackers, said an 11-year-old girl (whose name was not given) also managed to make changes on the same site in about 15 minutes, tripling the number of votes listed there, and in in all, more than 30 children hacked many other similar copies of state websites in less than half an hour. In a statement regarding the event, the National Association of State Secretaries expressed skepticism about the ability of hackers to gain access to real polling sites. “These systems are extremely difficult to replicate because many states use unique networks and specially crafted databases with new and updated security protocols,” the association said in a statement. “While it cannot be denied that sites are vulnerable to hackers, sites reporting on elections on the night following elections are only used to publish preliminary, unofficial results to the public and the media. These polling stations are not connected to the counting equipment and will never be able to change the actual election results. But Sell said the hacks involving the children show the level of security vulnerabilities found in the US electoral system. “The site may be a copy, but the vulnerabilities these children exploited were not copies, they are real.” And University of Pennsylvania professor Matt Blaze noted that the kids were dealing with copies, which in many cases were specially designed to be even more difficult to access than actual websites used by state secretaries around the country.
Newspaper headline:
Children “hacked” sites