17-Year-Old Hacks Midterm

Dear Money & Crisis Reader,

River O’Connor is 17 years old. And he just hacked a U.S. election.

“It took me around 10 minutes to crash the upcoming midterm,” River wrote for Politico earlier this week. “Once I accessed (. . .) the state election board’s database, I was able to shut down the website that would tally the votes, bringing the election to a screeching halt.”

And just like that, every single vote disappeared.

Deleted forever with the press of a button.

The backbone of our democracy undermined by a 17-year-old on a laptop.

Except, of course, the midterms haven’t happened yet. They won’t be held until November later this year.

And River isn’t an enemy of the State.

Far from it, in fact.

“Child’s Play”

Fortunately, this catastrophic security failure was part of a dry-run test of our election’s security systems.

The test took place at DEFCON 25, an annual hacking convention held in Las Vegas last week.

At the convention’s “Voter Village,” attendees could try their hand at hacking some real voting machines, as well as a sophisticated clone of our election website.

Now, despite being a replica, this faux website boasts all the exact same cybersecurity as the real thing. So, any security flaws found here are currently present in our actual voting tech.

Organizers of the test had expected some of the attendees would be able to access and edit some data. But they never dreamed that the whole election could be brought down around their ears.

And all with a couple of lines of code any amateur hacker could look up on Google.

“I’m 17. And I’m not even a very good hacker,” wrote River. “Despite that limited experience, I understood immediately when I got to Las Vegas this year why the professionals tend to refer to state election security as ‘child’s play’.”

Hackers Decide the Next U.S. Election

There’s a temptation to believe that our government is in control.

That they have the best of America’s resources at their disposal… the best talent… and tech that’s light-years beyond what we have in the private sector.

But I’m sorry to say, when it comes to cybersecurity, our government is sorely lacking.

We are decades behind Russia and China’s elite hacking squads… and yes, we’re even behind the 17-year-old boys who go to hacking camp in our own country.

And that’s a problem. No matter what your party allegiance is… or what you believe happened in the past… that’s a problem.

Because it undermines the entire democratic system this country was built upon.

And sure, our electoral system is far from perfect (we’ll delve deep into that pile of compost some other day). But if any dodo with a laptop and a WiFi signal can swing the vote, our country is at the mercy of our enemies.

The frustrating thing is it’s not like the talent we need doesn’t exist in the U.S. It’s just that most of these folks are over in Silicon Valley banking six-figure paychecks.

According to a 2016 study on cybersecurity, the U.S. government ranked worse than 17 major private industries.

(Incidentally, of the 600 government organizations examined in the report, the geniuses over at NASA performed the worst on cybersecurity.)

The solution?

Well, we obviously need to start enticing some of that Silicon Valley talent into government positions and beef up our cybersecurity. (Which isn’t as hard as it sounds. The cost of living is so high in the Valley, those six-figure salaries don’t go very far.)

But until then, the only thing we can do is revert to the classic… hacking-proof… ultra-secure… paper ballot.

Sure they’re a pain in the ass to count. But at least we know they didn’t come from some guy sitting in a basement in Beijing.

All the best,

Owen Sullivan
Editor, Money & Crisis

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