Hackers take on new voting machines at Defcon video | Cyber Security

Welcome to the 359.
I’m Ben Fox Rubin.
I’m Roger Cheng.
I’m Alfred Ng.
So Alfred, you just got back from Vegas where you attented the DefCon and BlackHat cybersecurity conferences.
Firdst of all, what was it like?
How did you like it?
I mean there was a ton of cybersecurity news that had come out of there.
I think I wrote like nine stories in three days.
All right.
Stop showing off.
I’m trying to.
But yeah, I mean, I think the big headline there was most likely the election hacking village, this is the second year in a row that they’ve done it.
This time around they wanted to prove all the naysayers wrong by basically saying, we’re putting mostly machines that are already in use because there was a criticism of last year’s voter hacking village, we don’t even use that machine anymore.
So, about 70% of the machines that were brought this time.
or are actually being used in this year’s election.
Okay.
And so, how easy were they to hack?
I mean like, are we in a lot of trouble?
I mean, so a lot of them were pretty simple to hack but another criticism of this year’s village is basically, you know Yeah but they have unlimited access so they can just go in and have as much time as they want with it.
During an actual election on election day, you have all these volunteers watching you and making sure you don’t go and put like a flash drive in it or anything like that.
But I think there’s still a lot of valid points being made from here were basically the ideas.
Okay but you’re still using this machine and just because you have people watching for it doesn’t mean that there can’t be, you know, some issue with physical security where your volunteer’s not looking.
Looking at it at this time and then the idea is people lose their confidence in an election, in the voting machines, even if it’s just one machine that’s compromised, the whole point is, I don’t know if I can really who we elected anymore, anything like that.