Black Hat and DEF CON are just around the corner, and one of the biggest headlines from last year’s conferences was the Voting Village where hackers broke into voting machines en masse. This year’s Voting Village at DEF CON will be three times the size of last year’s event to accommodate the massive demand from 2017, event organizer Harri Hursti told Tim. But it wasn’t easy to get to that point: Hursti said voting machine vendors unhappy with the publicity about hacked equipment threw up hurdles that forced them to get creative, like visiting government auctions to buy equipment to probe.

This year’s event will also feature a mock election, and equipment like smart cards and paper ballot scanners, said Hursti, an election security expert and a founding partner at Nordic Innovation Labs. While the voting machine vendors made it harder on them this year, Hursti expects that to eventually change. “Unfortunately, this is the same thing that has happened in all the other industries,” he said. “The first couple years, the hacking community is seen as a threat rather than a resource.” Hursti will also sit on a panel at a congressional election cybersecurity briefing today hosted by Verified Voting, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, Common Cause, FreedomWorks and the National Election Defense Coalition. Pros can read the whole story here.

Full Article: DEF CON Voting Village grows this year – POLITICO.