Voting machine hacking was featured at the DEF CON cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas over the weekend to show how easy it is. In fact, 30 out of 30 different machines from a variety of vendors were hacked.
The Hill said the machines came from Sequoia AVC Edge, ES&S iVotronic, Diebold TSX, Winvote, and Diebold Expresspoll 4000, among others.
"It took me only a few minutes to see how to hack it," security consultant Thomas Richards said, per The Hill. "I didn’t come in knowing what to expect, but I was surprised by what I found."
The newspaper stated that one machine used beneath-the-surface software, known as firmware. Since its 2007 design, several well-known vulnerabilities have been identified.
CNET wrote that chances to test the vulnerabilities of voting machines are rare because manufacturers don't often make their machines available for independent testing. Interest in voting machine technology has peaked since the 2016 election with concerns over Russian hacking, CNET noted.
"The exposure of those devices to the people who do bug bounties or actually look at these kind of devices has been fairly limited," Brian Knopf, an Internet of things security researcher for Neustar, a security analysis company, told CNET.
"And so DEF CON is a great opportunity for those of us who hack hardware and firmware to look to these kind of devices and really answer that question, 'Are they hackable?'" Knopf added.
Conference attendees told The Hill they hope the demonstration will help push states to pay more attention to voting machine protection.
"There's so much misinformation about voting machines on the Internet," Harri Hursti, co-founder of Nordic Innovation Labs, told The Hill. "The Village was announced last minute. But in the forums, people were active, looking to understand the problem. The changes have to start somewhere. This year it's in this room, next year it will be a bigger room."