It the latest example of fake news it turns out that all the recent hype in much of the mainstream media about teens being able to hack state election systems were untrue. The details of what actually happened were revealed in a CNBC article originally published in ProPublica on Friday by Lilia Chang, "No, a teen did not hack a state election."
Among the MSM outlets hyping the teenage hacker story were Politico Magazine and CNN. Of course, once it was revealed that no such hacking really took place they immediately issued corrections to their original fables... I kid! As of this writing no such corrections have been issued but here are the damning revelations about this fake news story disclosed by CNBC:
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.
And now the sad but unfake news of what really happened.
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.
Those websites were as fake as the fake news hyped by such outlets as Politico Magazine and CNN.
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.
"It would be lunacy to directly connect the election management system, of which the tabulation system is a part of, to the internet," Franklin said.
To get an idea of how much Politico Magazine hyped this fake news, just take a look at the melodramatic title of their August 21 article: "I Just Hacked a State Election. I’m 17. And I’m Not Even a Very Good Hacker."
Ana Cabrera, the anchor of CNN's weekend Newsroom, gave the co-organizer of the Def Con hacking conference, Jake Braun, a platform to hype the supposed hacking. However, notice how Braun not so deftly attempts to deflect from the question about the fake websites set up specifically for the coached teens to hack.
ANA CABRERA: These are mock websites. The National Association of Secretaries of State says that the mock sites really aren't representative of the real sites because "it would be extremely difficult to replicate these systems, that many states utilize unique networks and custom built data bases with new and updated security protocols." Is that a fair point?
JAKE BAUER: Well, no. I think they kind of totally miss the point actually. This is something that we know Russia has actually done in the Ukraine...
Bauer continued filibustering with a long non-answer to Cabrera's question about the mock sites. The main thing you need to know about Bauer came in Cabrera's introduction to him: "He is a former White House liaison to Homeland Security under President Obama."
Hmmm... Guess what the Democrats' excuse will probably be if they don't get the election results they expect in the midterm elections.
