WEBVTT 00:01.040 --> 00:07.940 Hi, my name is John Odom, and I'm currently the city clerk in Montpelier, Vermont. 00:08.100 --> 00:12.060 In that capacity, I'm also the election administrator. 00:12.300 --> 00:15.380 And, boy, has this been a year for that. 00:15.380 --> 00:20.120 We've got our own statewide primary coming up in about a week and a half. 00:20.120 --> 00:24.760 So, even taking a little time to record this is kind of challenging. 00:25.680 --> 00:30.060 I'm also a certified ethical hacker. 00:30.060 --> 00:37.900 I've been in charge of a couple networks and been a database administrator for various non-profits. 00:37.980 --> 00:53.220 So, I tend to have a little more hands-on knowledge than most of my colleagues in the industry, but not as much as you might think, because my life's a little busy and I don't get to practice this stuff very much. 00:53.220 --> 01:02.480 Anyways, I want to bring something to folks who participate in the Voting Village's attention. 01:02.480 --> 01:08.060 And it's not something that has been ignored, but I think it's something that deserves a little more attention. 01:09.220 --> 01:15.320 To make the point about how concerned I am, I'm going to tell you a little story. 01:16.020 --> 01:21.560 And this is not exactly on topic, but I want to use it to make a point. 01:21.560 --> 01:44.340 Several years back in Memphis, and some of you may have heard this story, there was a local election, the mayor was being elected, various local officials, and one clever person decided to compare the turnout from the tape, and most tabulators generate some sort of tape, 01:44.340 --> 01:53.600 some sort of physical record of the time listing the votes, and compare that number with what was reported through the GEMS system. 01:53.600 --> 02:00.620 And I know also a lot of folks who've been participating in Voting Village share some concerns about that system. 02:01.380 --> 02:04.460 Well, the numbers did not add up. 02:04.540 --> 02:17.310 According to the tape, 546 people in this particular precinct had voted, according to the tape, and the system only showed 330. 02:18.010 --> 02:27.550 They looked at this, they looked at other precincts, they found the same problem, especially in districts with heavy minority populations. 02:29.010 --> 02:36.750 Big problem, it's the problem we talk about at DEFCON, but I want to present another scenario to you. 02:36.750 --> 02:52.830 Consider this happening on a statewide level, not district by district, not precinct by precinct, not through any one individual network of voting machines, but an entire state. 02:53.730 --> 02:57.770 There are statewide systems that manage databases. 02:57.770 --> 03:08.370 This is mandated by the Help America Vote Act, which came in the wake of the 2000 presidential election voting debacle. 03:08.370 --> 03:15.330 You know, the hanging chads, the numbers that didn't add up, and it all went to the courts and it went to the Supreme Court. 03:15.790 --> 03:26.830 After that, there was a bipartisan group that got together, federally mandated, and came up with several recommendations. 03:26.830 --> 03:30.270 Now, generally, they were very good recommendations. 03:30.270 --> 03:33.850 I don't want to disrespect HAVA at all. 03:33.850 --> 03:54.670 One of the recommendations, understandably, was that states should be working on their voter rolls through one centralized system, one centralized statewide database that would contain all the voter registration information. 03:54.670 --> 03:57.630 But obviously, you can see where I'm going with this. 03:57.750 --> 04:04.810 There are concerns about, or we have to be concerned, about the security of these systems. 04:04.810 --> 04:12.550 So these statewide systems don't all necessarily just hold the voter registration information. 04:12.550 --> 04:18.850 A lot of them, including in my home state of Vermont, are actually election management systems. 04:19.750 --> 04:28.150 Election administrators will report their information for election night reporting. 04:28.750 --> 04:39.750 Sometimes we will work directly into these systems to manage it, to create our reports, to create our elections and local elections, and manage them directly out of that. 04:39.750 --> 04:42.430 So there's a lot going on with these systems. 04:42.430 --> 04:47.710 They are very important, and local administrators have come to really depend on them. 04:47.710 --> 04:49.770 Well, how are they doing? 04:49.990 --> 04:51.830 Could be better. 04:52.090 --> 04:55.850 I want to talk about the famous Mueller Report. 04:55.930 --> 05:01.830 Now, tucked away in that is this little gem that I'm going to read here, part of it. 05:01.870 --> 05:13.830 It says, in addition to targeting individuals involved in the Clinton campaign, Mueller's operation also targeted individuals and entities involved in the administration of the elections. 05:13.830 --> 05:15.250 Victims included U.S. 05:15.250 --> 05:24.550 state and local entities, such as state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and county governments, as well as individuals that work for the entities. 05:24.610 --> 05:37.570 They also targeted private technology firms responsible for manufacturing and administering election-related software and hardware, such as voter registration software and electronic polling stations. 05:37.570 --> 05:40.590 Now, here's the scary part. 05:40.590 --> 05:59.110 The report says that foreign actors targeted state and local databases of registered voters using a technique known as SQL injection, by which malicious code was sent to the state or local website in order to run commands. 05:59.110 --> 06:16.670 In one instance, in approximately June of 2016, the working group was able to compromise the computer network of the Illinois State Board of Elections by exploiting a vulnerability, presumably a SQL injection-related vulnerability. 06:16.670 --> 06:22.770 This gave them access to a database containing information on millions of registered Illinois voters. 06:22.770 --> 06:27.370 The group extracted data related to thousands of U.S. 06:27.370 --> 06:31.010 voters before the malicious activity was identified. 06:31.790 --> 06:43.450 Alright, so beyond just the obvious scary here, you know, okay, a lot of you folks will know that code injection is a very big deal. 06:43.450 --> 06:49.710 Code injection is, you know, it's where most of the hacks come from these days. 06:49.710 --> 06:50.950 But SQL? 06:52.110 --> 06:57.730 SQL injection is something we have been aware of for many years. 06:57.990 --> 07:00.470 We know how to harden against it. 07:00.610 --> 07:07.170 So my question is, why wasn't it already hardened against it? 07:07.170 --> 07:09.710 SQL injection is very easy. 07:09.710 --> 07:14.910 One line fed through to a database from a simple login screen can get you in. 07:15.530 --> 07:18.810 We know input validation is the solution. 07:18.870 --> 07:21.510 So where the hell was the input validation? 07:22.890 --> 07:35.870 What that says to me is, and you, again, to refer to Voting Village in the last few years, what's gotten a lot of attention was the simulation of the statewide voter database. 07:35.870 --> 07:46.070 It's got national coverage that kids could sit down at this simulation and they could hack right into our dummy statewide voter registration system. 07:46.070 --> 07:55.830 Well, of course, the pushback and all the yelling and hollering from the secretaries of state were that this was a phony simulation. 07:55.830 --> 07:58.770 That their systems are actually far more secure. 07:58.770 --> 08:01.950 Somehow this was set up to be hacked to make their point. 08:01.950 --> 08:17.170 Well, if SQL injection is a way to get into this stuff, I would argue that those systems, those dummy systems we made up, maybe were not loose and accessible enough. 08:17.170 --> 08:25.370 So, all right, so let's talk about HAVA, the Help America Vote Act. 08:26.630 --> 08:29.070 And I'm going to read a little bit from it. 08:29.070 --> 08:47.150 Part of the mandate is each state acting through the chief state election official shall implement in a uniform and nondiscriminatory manner a single uniform official centralized interactive computerized statewide voter registration list defined, maintained and administered at the state level. 08:47.150 --> 08:52.050 So states have no choice but to do this. 08:52.050 --> 08:56.830 And again, populations, what they are, it's completely understandable. 08:56.990 --> 08:59.130 So what do states do? 08:59.170 --> 09:02.650 Well, several do in-house development. 09:03.730 --> 09:16.530 In Vermont, we used to, our first database, our first election management system out of the box, out of HAVA was an internet facing FoxPro application. 09:17.190 --> 09:20.170 It was pretty crude. 09:20.770 --> 09:31.630 But these days, and other states currently are still doing in-house solutions, states like Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky. 09:31.630 --> 09:35.650 You could put together something pretty nice if you knew what you were doing. 09:36.990 --> 09:42.450 Obviously, then the networks they sit on, the municipal networks, are potentially vulnerable too. 09:42.470 --> 09:46.030 But if you can get in by SQL injection, why bother? 09:46.730 --> 09:52.410 Okay, but more and more often, you see these states using vendors. 09:52.410 --> 10:04.890 And these are vendors, you know, it's like any niche application, any niche market, you're going to get niche vendors who pop up specifically to serve that market. 10:07.010 --> 10:10.350 So before this, we had somebody call around. 10:10.350 --> 10:13.170 I wanted to know what states used what. 10:13.170 --> 10:16.190 How many of them used one vendor versus another? 10:16.190 --> 10:18.650 How many of them were designing in-house? 10:18.650 --> 10:26.230 I don't know if I can really say this, but word got out that we were calling around and there were people who were less than thrilled. 10:28.630 --> 10:34.090 And defensiveness in public systems should really make us all uncomfortable. 10:34.090 --> 10:43.370 Now, I want to look at one particular vendor right now, because I have a little more firsthand familiarity with it, called PCC. 10:44.190 --> 10:50.530 Now, here's a list from their website of their current clients. 10:51.130 --> 11:03.610 Okay, now factoring out for the consulting only options here, that's 15 states doing database management in election application hosting for voter registration, election night reporting. 11:04.090 --> 11:06.790 So who is PCC? 11:06.790 --> 11:08.990 Well, this is part of the problem. 11:08.990 --> 11:10.130 Who knows? 11:10.350 --> 11:14.130 Go to PCC's website and no staff is listed. 11:14.410 --> 11:17.470 Only board officers, not even the whole board. 11:17.730 --> 11:22.410 Now, I didn't do research on people who did show up. 11:22.410 --> 11:25.350 I probably should have, I could have, but I didn't. 11:25.350 --> 11:29.670 I don't want to knock them without any basis or unnecessarily then. 11:30.810 --> 11:34.590 And, you know, they seem to be perfectly reputable people. 11:34.590 --> 11:39.430 I didn't see any, the one I did look at, I didn't see any obvious big political connections. 11:40.650 --> 11:53.570 CEO Tom Ambergy is a big, was a big shot at Central Square Technology, for example, and they were recently at a major hack, a Magecart attack. 11:53.670 --> 11:56.750 Now, you know, I don't want to beat them up too much for a Magecart attack. 11:56.750 --> 11:57.750 They're good. 11:57.750 --> 12:02.150 But Magecart attacks generally use JavaScript injections. 12:02.150 --> 12:04.210 So it's something that could be hardened for. 12:04.370 --> 12:09.290 And with election systems, there's just no margin for error. 12:09.290 --> 12:11.610 You've got to be ahead of these games. 12:11.610 --> 12:17.310 So I wouldn't say that was a big concern of mine, but it does raise my eyebrow a little bit. 12:18.690 --> 12:35.150 But let's look at some of these proposals that PCC or organizations like PCC have put forward to the states to try to get their business. 12:35.150 --> 12:40.730 I want to show you the one from Delaware and just pieces of it. 12:40.730 --> 12:42.730 It's, of course, very, very long. 12:42.730 --> 12:55.130 But I'm going to show you here a typical page from the publicly posted proposal from PCC to run their election systems. 12:58.160 --> 13:02.660 OK, when you look at this, this is what you'll see. 13:03.340 --> 13:05.740 Not much. 13:07.080 --> 13:17.380 I, you know, I didn't do the measurement and everything, but from my glance, I would say at the most about 20 percent of this entire proposal is visible. 13:17.380 --> 13:19.400 So that's me being generous. 13:19.700 --> 13:25.140 Now, of course, I understand companies have proprietary information. 13:25.140 --> 13:28.620 They have proprietary stuff that's standard for any RFP. 13:28.620 --> 13:30.640 You expect that. 13:30.640 --> 13:32.280 But come on. 13:32.940 --> 13:34.820 Why even post it at all? 13:34.820 --> 13:40.100 I mean, this is something made available to the public, you know, public records. 13:40.280 --> 13:41.760 But it's not. 13:41.800 --> 13:44.120 I mean, it's it's it's almost a joke. 13:44.120 --> 13:47.120 If I didn't know better, I'd say it was almost passive aggressive. 13:47.480 --> 13:53.720 But what bothers me the most in terms of the redactions is all the staff is redacted. 13:53.720 --> 13:54.980 And this is typical. 13:54.980 --> 13:59.620 So just like the website, we don't know who's working on this. 13:59.620 --> 14:04.300 And that bothers me a lot because people have their own interests. 14:04.300 --> 14:09.720 They come from backgrounds, partisan backgrounds, nonprofit backgrounds. 14:09.720 --> 14:12.280 I think it's reasonable. 14:12.280 --> 14:27.580 And I don't think it necessarily, you know, reveals any particular corporate secrets that we could have some idea who the people are doing this stuff, either in an individual state or even at the company proper. 14:28.400 --> 14:32.420 Now, financials are also redacted. 14:32.420 --> 14:36.920 I know that's a thing that's very standard, but I would argue that it shouldn't be. 14:37.060 --> 14:45.540 I think our right to know trumps any embarrassment or discomfort of big companies. 14:45.540 --> 14:50.240 And publicly, we might not want one that's on the edge of bankruptcy. 14:50.240 --> 14:51.980 And we might want to see that. 14:51.980 --> 14:54.280 So so here is the problem. 14:54.280 --> 14:58.520 There are very few companies doing this. 14:59.480 --> 15:01.240 And they are opaque. 15:01.240 --> 15:03.400 We don't know who they are. 15:04.640 --> 15:06.120 And that's basically it. 15:06.120 --> 15:07.000 We don't know who they are. 15:07.000 --> 15:08.500 And that's scary. 15:08.500 --> 15:11.340 That's very, very scary, at least to me. 15:11.960 --> 15:14.520 And it does matter. 15:14.520 --> 15:24.980 In Georgia, they had a recent problem, a debacle involving their voter rolls, involving the voter registration. 15:24.980 --> 15:28.180 Now, this wasn't exactly what I'm talking about. 15:28.180 --> 15:36.500 But it makes the point about how badly you can screw up an election simply by screwing up voter rolls. 15:36.500 --> 15:39.760 You can disenfranchise people in a big election crush. 15:39.760 --> 15:52.200 They're just not going to get to vote or they're going to have to fill out an enormous amount of provisional ballots, which honestly might not necessarily get counted the way they should be. 15:52.240 --> 16:06.380 Now, during a court case involving this whole debacle, a lot of insecurities, a lot of vulnerabilities in the PCC system was was brought to the attention of the court. 16:06.380 --> 16:09.880 After that, Georgia decided to pull back. 16:09.880 --> 16:13.520 Their contract ran out and they decided to pull it back in-house. 16:13.520 --> 16:16.200 So that's a pretty unusual step to take. 16:16.200 --> 16:20.200 And it shows you just how concerning those vulnerabilities were. 16:20.980 --> 16:24.980 Now, you know, we've got our public officials doing this. 16:24.980 --> 16:31.700 Can we count on our public officials to be straight with us about this stuff if there's a problem? 16:31.700 --> 16:34.440 Well, obviously not. 16:34.440 --> 16:40.480 And again, I don't mean to knock secretaries of states, but they have their own interest. 16:40.480 --> 16:46.620 They have an interest in getting reelected, and that means they have interest in looking competent. 16:46.980 --> 16:50.560 Now, some of them like to talk about internal security a lot. 16:50.560 --> 16:52.900 You know, we've upgraded this to make it better. 16:52.900 --> 16:55.460 We've got better voting machines to make this better. 16:55.460 --> 17:06.160 We're doing our due diligence within the sphere that we control in order to do a better job and get reelected. 17:06.160 --> 17:10.540 They don't like to talk about the potential for things outside. 17:10.820 --> 17:29.140 And that means they don't necessarily like to talk about the walls that they've built that they're responsible for that are, you know, the dividing the firewall, pardon the expression, between the voters and the outside world where you could have malicious actors. 17:29.140 --> 17:32.900 And again, with the Mueller report, we're talking about advanced persistent threats. 17:32.900 --> 17:37.040 We're talking about state actors, but not necessarily. 17:39.520 --> 17:46.480 So secretaries of state have a vested interest in saying everything's rosy and everything's wonderful. 17:46.480 --> 17:49.260 So that, that is a problem. 17:50.020 --> 17:52.380 So let's look at some of the other systems. 17:52.380 --> 17:57.220 I've been picking on PCC, but there are other systems out there. 17:58.700 --> 18:09.060 And folks might recognize, Voting Village might recognize one of the other major, probably the other major election management system that's out there. 18:09.180 --> 18:11.780 It's from ES&S. 18:12.420 --> 18:15.640 ES&S are our old friends. 18:15.740 --> 18:20.500 For years, Voting Village has been hacking their machines. 18:20.620 --> 18:25.520 And they, more than any of their companies, have been the most belligerent. 18:26.240 --> 18:37.160 Last year, I believe it was, they actually had folks sort of roaming about trying to make people uncomfortable about hacking, suggesting they shouldn't. 18:37.160 --> 18:42.760 These were the last folks to come around and say that Voting Village had a point. 18:43.120 --> 18:45.320 And it was only after so much coverage. 18:45.320 --> 18:46.860 Again, I think it was last year. 18:46.860 --> 18:50.100 These folks are not good partners. 18:50.320 --> 18:53.240 They are not reliable partners in our experience. 18:53.240 --> 19:00.100 I don't want to get sued for slander here, but in my opinion, based on what we've seen, these are not good partners. 19:00.100 --> 19:16.340 And we will remember how quickly the National Association of Secretaries of State last year was right there to defend them on their own terms, on ES&S's terms, and in some language that looked a little bit much like their own words sometimes. 19:17.140 --> 19:19.180 So, scary. 19:19.180 --> 19:20.120 Scary stuff. 19:20.120 --> 19:23.240 And are these things we can test in Voting Village? 19:23.240 --> 19:26.040 The way we take apart the voting machines? 19:26.040 --> 19:27.060 Of course not. 19:27.060 --> 19:27.920 Of course not. 19:27.920 --> 19:35.000 We can make our own, you know, dummy systems like we have, and we should, and there's a lot to be made there. 19:35.000 --> 19:36.680 But we can't go and test these systems. 19:36.680 --> 19:37.280 It's hacking. 19:37.280 --> 19:38.940 We can't hack, right? 19:41.520 --> 19:45.420 So, I've thrown a bunch of terrible stuff at you here. 19:46.460 --> 19:49.380 The question is, what do we need? 19:49.380 --> 19:51.800 Do I have any solutions here? 19:51.800 --> 19:55.960 Well, first of all, transparency. 19:56.120 --> 19:58.680 Transparency, transparency, transparency. 19:58.680 --> 20:00.420 We should know who these people are. 20:00.420 --> 20:04.060 We should know who runs them, what their interests are. 20:04.500 --> 20:07.860 We should know what their background are. 20:07.860 --> 20:16.380 We should know, we should need to know whether these folks even have the competence to do what they claim to do. 20:16.380 --> 20:37.220 And I'm going to talk a little bit about the Iowa debacle, where the, during the caucuses, or the primary caucuses this year, the Democratic Party was using these little specially designed, custom designed apps, mobile apps, to report the results of the caucuses to a central place. 20:37.740 --> 20:39.820 You all probably heard about this. 20:39.820 --> 20:41.360 They were a disaster. 20:41.360 --> 20:42.940 They were a disaster. 20:42.940 --> 20:52.840 It took a very long time to sort of rebuild the mess that they created, and actually generate a final voting tally. 20:52.840 --> 20:55.540 It was a big embarrassment to the Democratic Party. 20:55.540 --> 20:59.980 They were going to be using the same systems in Nevada, and they pulled that out. 21:02.200 --> 21:17.880 Now, what I would say, the biggest problem, conceptually, with that application, was that it was made by, and you see this a lot, made by folks in the industry who made a lot of personal connections. 21:17.880 --> 21:28.240 You know, these were folks who had worked for the Democratic Party, done IT stuff, and they decided to go out on their own, and they made a crappy product. 21:28.240 --> 21:32.300 But the crappy product was bought up because, oh, we know these people. 21:32.300 --> 21:34.320 These people are in our industry. 21:34.320 --> 21:35.760 They're in our world. 21:35.760 --> 21:36.660 We know them. 21:36.660 --> 21:37.680 We trust them. 21:38.020 --> 21:45.020 So, I don't know if the same thing isn't going on with some of these voting applications. 21:45.020 --> 21:47.380 PCC, who knows who ES&S hired? 21:47.380 --> 21:51.120 That is a real, real problem in this industry. 21:51.280 --> 21:56.400 So, we need to know who's doing it, because we need to know if they're competent. 21:56.400 --> 22:02.420 If they're reaching out for the best people, or if they're just reaching out for people who are connected with the company. 22:03.060 --> 22:05.080 Which gets us back to another point. 22:05.080 --> 22:07.100 This needs to be opened up. 22:07.100 --> 22:15.660 If we've got one, or two, or three companies doing this, that gives those one, or two, or three companies a lot of power. 22:15.660 --> 22:20.620 We need to have more genuine RFPs get this out there. 22:20.620 --> 22:28.360 I'm not saying there are angelic companies out there, but mixing it up a little would help. 22:29.240 --> 22:32.340 Now, second, we've got to test this stuff. 22:32.340 --> 22:40.580 I'm sure the Secretaries of State do pen tests on their systems, but it sure didn't help for 2016. 22:40.680 --> 22:45.260 I don't know how a pen test misses a SQL injection attack. 22:45.520 --> 22:48.160 There are pen tests, and there are pen tests. 22:48.160 --> 22:55.040 And again, the Secretaries of State have a vested interest in not finding vulnerabilities. 22:55.320 --> 23:00.720 So, and I've seen some of this, the pen tests tend to be minimal. 23:00.720 --> 23:03.700 So, we talk about standards for voting machines. 23:03.700 --> 23:08.900 We should have standards for these systems, and reports should be publicly available. 23:08.900 --> 23:11.840 We need standards for penetration testing. 23:11.840 --> 23:18.280 And that includes testing for social engineering all the way down to the user level. 23:18.280 --> 23:27.680 All the way down to the level of the election administrator who, you know, has their own account and talks to this database system. 23:27.700 --> 23:34.200 A thorough pen test is going to include tests for social engineering, and you don't generally see that. 23:34.200 --> 23:39.300 Especially when you consider any kind of code injection. 23:39.380 --> 23:42.820 Notwithstanding, the biggest problem will always be malware. 23:43.220 --> 23:45.080 It will always be malware. 23:45.940 --> 23:48.460 You can't really audit these systems. 23:48.480 --> 23:52.400 So, we need those standards and, again, transparencies and transparency. 23:53.720 --> 23:56.440 Yeah, you have to redact most of a pen test. 23:56.440 --> 23:58.000 Sure, and that just makes sense. 23:58.000 --> 24:05.380 But we could at least be able to see the executive summary of these pen tests as a public document. 24:05.380 --> 24:07.340 So, I would argue standards. 24:07.340 --> 24:09.020 I would argue, again, transparency. 24:09.020 --> 24:10.440 Those are the big two words. 24:10.440 --> 24:12.140 Standards, transparency. 24:12.920 --> 24:14.840 That gets us a long way. 24:15.200 --> 24:19.620 Now, I cannot stress how much of a problem this is. 24:19.700 --> 24:25.780 You know, if we're talking about voting machines and systems, which we love to talk about and we need to talk about. 24:25.780 --> 24:32.000 A presidential election on those terms would be hard to tank just by going after voting machines. 24:32.000 --> 24:34.560 But not these systems. 24:35.160 --> 24:37.440 There may be thousands. 24:37.580 --> 24:40.120 I think 7,000 is what I read. 24:40.360 --> 24:44.040 Localized voting machine tabulation systems. 24:44.960 --> 24:48.300 You know, that's a lot to get into and hack, although not for a local election. 24:48.300 --> 24:51.340 And local elections are every bit as important as national elections. 24:51.340 --> 24:52.680 It's all democracy. 24:53.060 --> 24:54.920 Although, again, not impossible. 24:54.920 --> 25:08.720 But when you're talking about these online databases and these internet-facing user election management systems, we go from 7,000 targets down to 50. 25:08.720 --> 25:10.940 50 targets. 25:11.020 --> 25:13.240 That's a lot more appealing. 25:13.240 --> 25:14.680 It's a lot more dangerous. 25:14.680 --> 25:17.580 And these systems interact. 25:18.980 --> 25:26.760 First of all, most states, you're going to see some kind of connection or some kind of ties to the DMVs, to the Department of Motor Vehicles. 25:26.760 --> 25:31.980 You know, we always have to check off for, do I want to be registered to vote too? 25:31.980 --> 25:36.880 There are states like Vermont, I'm proud to say, that have automatic voter registration. 25:37.040 --> 25:39.980 So those systems have to talk to each other some ways. 25:39.980 --> 25:41.280 There are safe ways to do it. 25:41.280 --> 25:43.020 There are unsafe ways to do it. 25:43.040 --> 25:46.300 We don't know, again, how they're doing it. 25:47.520 --> 25:49.420 Tax departments. 25:49.420 --> 25:52.640 Some states even connect to their tax departments. 25:52.700 --> 26:01.800 So, obviously, any big extensive network-to-network, they're going to be as strong as their weakest links. 26:02.300 --> 26:07.980 And those weakest links could be in the statewide networks talking to each other. 26:07.980 --> 26:11.500 The weakest links, more often than not, are the users. 26:11.500 --> 26:22.260 In New England, you can have election administrators running jurisdictions of as few as 70 people. 26:22.260 --> 26:40.660 They don't have a lot of good equipment, and they don't necessarily have a lot of sophistication in how to do proper hygiene, guard against social engineering, against spear phishing. 26:40.660 --> 26:46.100 I mean, if I were somebody, I'd take aim at one of those folks, and I'd go right after them. 26:46.120 --> 26:52.200 There's also ERIC, which is something I don't know about. 26:52.480 --> 26:57.440 ERIC is a statewide system, which now covers about half of the states. 26:57.440 --> 27:07.480 I think it's roughly 25, with more looking at it, whereby states interact their databases so they can track cross-state registrations. 27:07.480 --> 27:18.820 As it is, it's been a challenge for those states to take someone off a roll in one state because they registered in another state. 27:18.820 --> 27:20.240 That's a challenge. 27:20.240 --> 27:28.980 It's a weakness that a lot of folks have made a lot of fuss about, and honestly, they probably should. 27:28.980 --> 27:36.060 That stuff has been a matter of sending a piece of paper or an email from one secretary of state's office to the other. 27:36.860 --> 27:40.940 So, obviously, you're going to have systems like ERIC popping up. 27:40.940 --> 27:53.060 Now, my understanding, which is limited, is that in ERIC, you're not having a situation where the statewide databases are talking directly to each other, which is great. 27:53.060 --> 27:57.740 But, obviously, again, there is the malware issue. 27:59.320 --> 28:02.520 Malware can ride along with all kinds of things. 28:02.520 --> 28:08.700 And at any given time, a third or more of the malware out there in the wild could be zero-day. 28:08.700 --> 28:13.780 So, you know, it's the same problem we have with antivirus systems. 28:13.780 --> 28:15.260 They can only be so up-to-date. 28:15.260 --> 28:17.220 They can only be so current. 28:18.820 --> 28:22.540 So, anyway, I'm not going to say, I hope I didn't scare you. 28:22.540 --> 28:23.540 I hope I did. 28:23.540 --> 28:24.760 That's why I'm here. 28:24.760 --> 28:32.840 I think that's why a lot of us are here, are to scare people into action and to scare people into making things better. 28:33.280 --> 28:36.240 Again, I'm not trying to knock anybody down. 28:36.240 --> 28:39.720 I'm just trying to draw a lot of attention to this problem. 28:39.720 --> 28:48.800 And this is a problem we could go into a lot more technical detail on, and, you know, I could talk for, you know, an hour or two if I wanted to. 28:48.800 --> 28:51.160 But I want to keep this accessible. 28:51.160 --> 28:57.840 I know for the election administrators who are watching this, and also I only have about 20 or 30 minutes to do it. 28:57.840 --> 29:03.200 But it's a conversation I think we need to have a lot more of. 29:03.320 --> 29:03.940 Thanks. 29:03.960 --> 29:05.520 Thanks very much for listening. 29:05.520 --> 29:11.220 Thanks for Voting Village for having me, and hopefully I'll see you next year, maybe even in person.