Comedian Nathan Fielder Teamed Up With an Election Security Expert To Show How Easy It Is To Hack Into The Emmy's Voting System

There may not be a more underrated funny guy out there than Nathan Fielder. His show ‘Nathan For You’ on Comedy Central is simply a masterpiece of awkward sarcasm mixed with pure genius. So far there have been four seasons and if you haven’t seen any of them yet I’m extremely jealous because you’re in for a treat.

Well, to get a taste of what Nathan is like, go watch the video above. I know it’s 12 minutes long, but as a joke (not really) Fielder exposes the Emmy voting system to show how easy it is to hack and manipulate the numbers for the Emmy’s award show. If you don’t have 12 minutes, and instead want to go check Instagram for the 15th time today, then quickly read below as I do my best to describe what they did in 4th grade terminology.

Nathan brings on Carsten Schurmann who is an actual election security expert, but also could 1000% pass for the being the next James Bond villain with his accent and looks.

Back in 2017, Carsten attended Def Con in Las Vegas, which is a huge hacker conference. There he demonstrated how easy it was to hack our US election voting systems. At the conference he hacked the WINVote machines that were used between 2004 and 2015 and within 30 minutes manipulated the votes. Yeah, he’s a bad mamma jama, but he also showed that it doesn’t take the next Einstein to do this either.

So How Did He Hack Into The Emmy’s?

Now Carsten is back to show how Emmy voting could easily be fucked with. Nathan reiterates they are not criminals and this was just a demonstration, so you should definitely not do this at home and stuff the votes for Nathan For You (wink, wink). Carsten explains how Emmys2018.com was still a domain name available and that he bought it for fun. He recreates the Emmy website home page along with the real email that is sent out to voters. The moment voters log in to the fake site with their info, Carsten would have their information since he controls the site. The real Emmy’s website uses a two factor verification code to show they are “secure.” Because Carsten would already have the voter’s actual credentials that were given on the fake site he can do this process on the real site and have a code texted to the voter. Once that happens he or she would then put that code into the fake website and give Carsten that info as well. So now the hacker has the voter’s real log in credentials and their verification code they received via text. Using that the hacker can access the real Emmy’s website and place votes that count without the real voter knowing. Just like that you’ve hacked into the Emmy’s website. Was that hard at all? Not really.

Of all the people to expose the Emmy’s, it’s Nathan Fielder. What a world. Here’s to hoping Nathan For You wins in a total fair fashion