With its sensationalist rhetoric, flashy theatrics, unstructured hacking, and lack of context about how elections operate, DEFCON also emphasizes the vulnerabilities that are possible, even when they’re not necessarily probable. The people at the village came because they love hacking, not voting. “I don’t think anyone knows what they are,” one of the dozen or so onlookers said, laughing. “Is it an electronic poll book?” I offered up. They were shocked how easily they could access administrator files-but did they know what this machine actually did? They both paused. “When it said ‘password,’ we were expecting some kind of encryption,” he said, “but there wasn’t, so we were just really surprised.”įor the next 20 minutes, the twentysomethings inspected the desktop’s recycling bin and debated whether it was safe to transfer data using a USB drive they’d found on the floor. “We found two credentials on the database,” one told VICE News. They were fiddling with screens about the size of a laptop, and it sounded like they had a breakthrough. The morning of the first day, two men started cheering at a table near the entrance. “And every future machine can be hacked.”įor the event last August, all of the Village’s presentations had moved online due to COVID, and about 50 people were in the ballroom at any one time. “We know every single machine in this room can be hacked,” Hursti said on the first day of the August, 2021 convention. needs to fundamentally restructure elections. Most couldn’t explain the difference between certain voting machines, many didn’t remember whether they cast a ballot on paper or a digital touchscreen, and almost none, including an election official, knew which machines were in their local polling sites. Throughout the 2021 conference, VICE News spoke to roughly 40 attendees. As a result, the event serves as easy fodder for dis- and malinformation, showing how even well-intentioned experts are being used to prop up the Big Lie. But with its sensationalist rhetoric, flashy theatrics, unstructured hacking, and lack of context about how elections operate, DEFCON also emphasizes the vulnerabilities that are possible, even when they’re not necessarily probable. The experts here agree that there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and many have worked hard to debunk those conspiracy theories. Meanwhile, the federal agency that leads the national effort to understand, manage, and reduce risk to our cyber and physical infrastructure, called the 2020 election “ the most secure in American history.”Īnd then there is DEFCON. Even if they refused to cooperate, their work was included in the infamous “Kraken” legal briefs that were supposed to prove the presence of widespread voter fraud (they did not).Ĭountless audits later, many Republican officials are still arguing that our election infrastructure could have been compromised in 2020. Many of the village’s experts, like one of its organizers, Harri Hursti, were approached by lawyers working to challenge the results of the 2020 election. Last year, Trump tweeted a video from the conference to support his baseless accusations of fraud. This has since changed: After former President Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, material from DEFCON is now being used to sow the Big Lie that Trump actually won the election. “Multiple types of DREs, some of which are currently in use in Virginia, were hacked, according to public reports from DefCon,” the agency wrote.īefore the 2020 election, these stunts were vaguely concerning to the general public but largely confined to the elections industry. It also has quick impact: Following demonstrations at the convention in 2017, Virginia’s Department of Elections recommended decertifying some of its machines effective immediately. With its made-to-be-shared antics, the village regularly produces viral tweets and national headlines.

For a few days, DEFCON enthusiasts gather together and race to see who can prove voting machines are insecure. Now, two years later, the issue has become even more of a national obsession.ĭEFCON is a meeting place for the different stakeholders in the world of cybersecurity: grungy hackers, nerdy academics, security researchers, election officials, voting machine manufacturers, and representatives from the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), the federal agency whose security guidelines nearly every state relies on to some extent. At the last in-person DEFCON, in 2019, well before “Stop the Steal,” the “audit” in Maricopa County, and the conspiracy theory that Nancy Pelosi’s husband owns one of the country’s largest voting machine manufacturers, attendees packed the village.

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