Schoolboy Hacked Mock Florida Election Site In 10 Minutes

At the annual hacker conference DefCon erlier this year, Emmett Brewer, an 11-year-old boy from Austin, Texas, was able to change the results on a mock Florida election website. It took him 10 minutes.Though the website in question was a mere replica of the Florida Secretary of State website, the hack points to the larger vulnerabilities of the election infrastructure. The hacking event was part of a hands-on workshop within the larger cybersecurity conference. In a series of exercises, adults and kids participating in the “DefCon Voting Machine Hacking Village” attempted to manipulate party names, candidate names, and vote-count totals on mock websites from key battleground states. Brewer was one of about 50 children between the ages of 8 and 16 who took part.“The site may be a replica but the vulnerabilities that these kids were exploiting were not replicas, they’re the real thing,” Nico Sell, the event organizer, told PBS. In a statement, the National Association for Secretaries of State questioned the hacking event, claiming it was not a realistic proxy for the systems currently in use.

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2018/08/11-year-old-hacked-mock-florida-election-site-10-minutes/150516/