Hackers have managed to break into US voting systems and take control of them in minutes, raising fears that cyber criminals could easily tamper with elections results.
Security experts cracked the security of digital ballot boxes used in US elections within 90 minutes at the Def Con hacking summit in Las Vegas. The hackers successfully broke into the boxes through their hardware and through wireless signals.
Def Con staged the hack at its annual conference in Las Vegas to showcase the security of the US voting system. They purchased 30 different election machines from a US Government auction and timed how long it took them to break in.
The ethical hackers found voting machines running out-of-date and insecure software, which they were able to exploit to gain access to the devices. They also found hardware weaknesses that could have let cyber criminals tamper with the machines.
One of the worst devices was the WinVote machine, used in some county elections, in which the hackers found a problem with the Wi-Fi connection that let them break in. They also discovered that it was secured with the password "ABCDE". Advanced Voting Solutions, which made the WinVote system, shut down in 2007, but its machine was used in local elections in Virginia in 2015.
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Hackers take control of US voting machines in less than 90 minutes