‘Coalition of American academics and hackers wants to secure voting machines’

A group of American academics and hackers who hacked into voting machines at the Defcon security conference is forming a coalition to secure those devices. That would also apply to other systems used during the elections.

Reuters, citing a source with knowledge of the plans, writes that the National Association of Governors, the Center for Internet Security and the Atlantic Council think tank are also involved in the initiative. The coalition’s announcement is due soon, as the Defcon researchers publish a report detailing the vulnerabilities they found in voting machines. The report would recommend, among other things, that voting machine builders reduce the number of parts and software imported from outside the US to avoid tampering with the manufacturing process.

Hackers were able to break into a WinVote voting machine over Wi-Fi within two hours during Defcon. A total of thirty machines were present at the conference. However, these were old machines that were no longer used. It turned out that they often ran outdated software, for example, some devices were equipped with Windows XP. The hackers have already published their results via GitHub, it is unclear whether the report describing Reuters will contain any new findings.