This week, the annual Black Hat hacker convention ended, and the cybersecurity conference DEF CON 32 began in Las Vegas. On the sidelines of these events was the Hackers for Harris fundraiser, with those in the hacking and cybersecurity communities donating an estimated $150,000 to Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign fund.
Hackers For Harris Show Support At Black Hat And DEF CON 2024
Hosted by former White House acting national cybersecurity director Kemba Walden and her former acting deputy principal director as well as co-founder of the DEF CON Voting Village, Jake Braun, in a bar at the Las Vegas Convention Center, the event is reported to have raised more than twice the total from the two previous events supporting Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden combined.
Although the numbers were not huge, an estimated 150 from the thousands that attend these conferences, given the inherent distrust of all things ‘government’ by certain elements of the hacking community, it is a testament to Harris’ past work dealing with cybersecurity issues that hackers from Black Hat and DEF CON should gather in such a way. “We exceeded the amount of money we hoped to earn,” Walden told Politico, “But more importantly, or just as important for me, was that people here understood that Vice President Harris is not new to this space.”
Hacking Voting Machines For Free And Fair Elections
Some users of the X, formerly Twitter, have already taken to the social network to complain that something called Hackers for Harris must amount to election interference. However, this is a misinterpretation of what the hackers at these events, and specifically those taking part in the Voting Village, are there to do. Black Hat and DEF CON are the most anticipated cybersecurity conventions for hackers not just in the U.S. but worldwide. They are places to share knowledge and help protect systems, software and services moving forward. The Voting Village, which first appeared at DEF CON in 2017, exists to enable hackers to probe voting machines for vulnerabilities in order to make them as secure as possible during elections.
In 2018, when Harris was a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, voting machine vendors lobbied against the Voting Village. Harris was among the signatories of a letter to one such vendor that supported the event and argued “free, fair, and trusted elections are the bedrock of our democracy, and safeguarding our elections is an urgent national security priority.” This support for the hacking community has not been forgotten, hence the success of the Hackers for Harris event.
