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Did an 11-year-old kid hack the Florida Secretary Of State voting website?

The short answer is that an exact copy of the website was hacked, yes. In just 10 minutes. By an 11-year-old kid.
Residents of Dade county, Florida, use electronic voting machines to cast their votes at a local polling station 29 October 2004, in Coral Gables, Florida. (Photo credit ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)
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It’s a time-honored tradition for companies and governments to hire hackers to see if they can get through security systems, software, and hardware. The reason? So that said systems can be improved, strengthened, and firmed up.

The State of Florida, among others, might need to hire an 11-year-old boy to work on that kind of thing; first, though, its representative organization, the National Association of Secretaries of State, got a little miffed that a bunch of people sat in a room and tried to hack its vote totals websites—or, more accurately, replicas thereof. The organization’s statement was quoted and commented on by Buzzfeed’s cybersecurity correspondent, Kevin Collier. 

Well this is interesting. National Association of Secretaries of State issues statement against the Def Con Voting Village. Says its attempt to recreate (and likely hack the shit out of) a connected mockup of the election process isn’t realistic. pic.twitter.com/c1uy694UPA

— Kevin Collier (@kevincollier) August 9, 2018

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