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No, a Teen Did Not Hack a State Election (propublica.org)
Headlines from Def Con, a hacking conference held this month in Las Vegas, might have left some thinking that infiltrating state election websites and affecting the 2018 midterm results would be child's play. Articles reported that teenage hackers at the event were able to "crash the upcoming midterm elections" and that it had taken "an 11-year-old hacker just 10 minutes to change election results." A first-person account by a 17-year-old in Politico Magazine described how he shut down a website that would tally votes in November, "bringing the election to a screeching halt." But now, elections experts are raising concerns that misunderstandings about the event -- many of them stoked by its organizers -- have left people with a distorted sense of its implications. From a report: In a website published before r00tz Asylum, the youth section of Def Con, organizers indicated that students would attempt to hack exact duplicates of state election websites, referring to them as "replicas" or "exact clones." (The language was scaled back after the conference to simply say "clones.") Instead, students were working with look-alikes created for the event that had vulnerabilities they were coached to find. Organizers provided them with cheat sheets, and adults walked the students through the challenges they would encounter. Josh Franklin, an elections expert formerly at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and a speaker at Def Con, called the websites "fake." "When I learned that they were not using exact copies and pains hadn't been taken to more properly replicate the underlying infrastructure, I was definitely saddened," Franklin said. Franklin and David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, also pointed out that while state election websites report voting results, they do not actually tabulate votes. This information is kept separately and would not be affected if hackers got into sites that display vote totals.
I don't get why this is new news.
You don't eh? It's a big mystery to you?
We're almost into year 3 of endless "the election was hacked!!1!" bullshit fed to these idiots continuously through every feed come in contact with. So every stupid nothingburger story about election hacks ricochets around the progressive echo chamber like Happy Fun Ball.
Sometimes people feel so strongly about a cause, for example the dangers of electronic voting, that they think its ok to distort information or even outright lie for that cause. Its becoming very common - and I think its always wrong.
Only exist in film.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction
Yeh sure, the election wasn't hacked
You have evidence it was? Please share, I have seen no evidence in the mainstream press, just speculation.
those hacked emails were all nothingburgers
Hacking into the email of a political party is not "hacking the election", see, the elections are run by the states, and a political party has no part in the running of an election.
Your spewage on Windows XP, paper trails, and Russian Asbestos don't merit a response.
The Hillary Campaign tried to run a very different, data-driven campaign in 2016 than candidates had previously employed, and her campaign's data told her there was no need to visit several "blue wall states" in the general election, that she should instead maximize her fund-raising on either coast.
Hillary lost (or Trump won) because of simple mistakes made by her campaign, nothing more - but rather than accept that simple fact, we are spending countless millions of dollars investigating opposition research put together by the losing candidate in the last election (at a cost of millions of dollars) because her supporters are too butt-hurt to accept that "the smartest, most prepared woman" ran a lousy campaign and lost.
Ken