How DEF CON’s election hackers are trying to protect themselves

Every August at a conference hall in Las Vegas, long lines of computer hackers armed with USB sticks, screwdrivers or their bare fingernails try breaking into election equipment — all in the hope of finding better ways to protect it.

But organizers of the event at this year’s DEF CON hacker convention — which ends Sunday — spent just as much time focusing on the physical safety of the security researchers hacking into machines as they did on the hardware. Since former President Donald Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 election, the researchers who scour election equipment for vulnerabilities have increasingly been targets of threats and harassment.

So the organizers of the conference’s “Voting Village” hacking event enlisted undercover security consultants, moved the event to a side room where they could more closely monitor who went in and out and briefed their nearly two dozen volunteers on what to do if any agitators showed up.

The measures offer a small window into an increasingly regular feature of America’s voting security landscape. The rise in disinformation-fueled threats is forcing election administrators, poll workers and security researchers to think more deeply about physical safety, and take a host of new precautions to do their job.

At last year’s DEF CON, a pair of minor but troubling incidents involving election conspiracy theorists set off alarm bells for said Catherine Terranova, one of the two organizers of the Voting Village.

“The day after DEF CON ended last year, I started pouring all of my time and energy into figuring out how to secure this village,” Terranova said. “I said to myself, ‘we are never doing this like this again.’”

It’s an issue government election security officials are thinking about as well.

“Any threat of violence against an election official, poll worker, or anyone else working to safeguard our democracy is completely unacceptable. These folks are members of our communities, and dedicated public servants,” CISA Director Jen Easterly said in a statement.

The Voting Village is a small part of the enormous DEF CON conference, which draws almost 30,000 hackers annually. It started in the aftermath of the…