A Law is Expiring that Allows Ethical Hackers to Help Protect US elections

A division of the Library of Congress could play a key role in ensuring future US elections are protected against cyberattacks that alter vote tallies or other digital meddling, the authors of a major report on election hacking said. That division, the US Copyright Office, approved a slate of exemptions to a 1996 copyright law that give ethical hackers more leeway to search for digital vulnerabilities in products without facing legal threats from companies that don’t want their security gaps exposed. The exemption, which came out shortly after the 2016 election, included a specific provision freeing ethical hackers to poke and prod at voting machines. That provision paved the way for a “voting machine hacking village” at the 2017 DEF CON security conference in Las Vegas in July that turned up cyber vulnerabilities in numerous voting systems. If the exemption is allowed to expire in 2018, however, it could leave future elections more vulnerable to nation-state and criminal hackers.