In a race against time before the election, a crew of the world’s elite hackers took over a Las Vegas conference room last weekend, turning it into a high-tech battleground. Their mission was to infiltrate and expose the vulnerabilities of the very voting machines set to be used in the upcoming election.
Called the Voting Village at the DEF CON hacker conference, the setup resembled more of a high-security tech lab than anything else, where these cybersecurity experts dissected and tested the machines to help election officials patch potential security flaws. Unfortunately, their critical findings might just miss the deadline to implement any changes, adding an element of suspense to the electoral process.
Politico reported:
In one sense, it’s the normal course of events: Every August, hackers at the DEF CON conference find security gaps in voting equipment, and every year the long and complex process of fixing them means nothing is implemented until the next electoral cycle.
But Election Day security is under particular scrutiny in 2024. That’s both because of increasing worries that foreign adversaries will figure out how to breach machines, and because President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations of widespread fraud in 2020 undermined confidence in the