At the DEF CON hacker conference, which officially kicked off on Thursday, kids as young as 8 will target replicas of election results reporting sites—because it would just be too easy for adult hackers to do it.
It’s part of a competition taking place Friday and Saturday at the gathering’s Voting Village—which organizers rolled out for the first time last year—where “the entire voting infrastructure” will go under hackers’ scrutiny.
At this year’s Voting Village, 8- to 16-year-old hackers will try to exploit the resource media rely on for election results as they come in.
“Kids will hack into replicas of the Secretary of State election results websites for thirteen Presidential Battleground States, manipulating vote tallies and election results,” organizers explain.
According to Jake Braun, a former White House liaison for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, who’s also co-founder of the Voting Village and executive director of the University of Chicago Cyber Policy Initiative, it would be a “waste of time” to show that the election results sites could be penetrated by older experts.
“These websites are so easy to hack we couldn’t give them to adult hackers—they’d be laughed off the stage,” Braun told ABC News. “They thought hacking a voter website was interesting 20 years ago. We had to give it to kids to actually make it challenging.”
As Voting Village laid out in a pair of tweets, the goal of the competition is threefold:
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