Collaborate Disseminate
A letter from election officials in all 50 states and D.C. said the agency needed to take immediate action.
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This kind of activity is likely to continue or increase as the 2022 midterms approach, the FBI said.
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State and local governments, those running for office and the American electorate are facing an unprecedented election process this year in which mail-in ballots will play a large part in how voters pick their elected officials during a once-in-a-century pandemic. In doing so, they have to navigate a U.S. Postal Service that has warned of tardy ballot deliveries, cut through the din of misinformation coming from President Donald Trump, and overcome a process that can be confusing on a number of different levels. While mail-in voting and cybersecurity don’t seem to go hand-in-hand, security officials are heavily involved in making sure the entire operation can be trusted once it’s complete. Here’s what you need to know about mail-in balloting and how it will play a greater role in this presidential election: How long has voting by mail been going on, and how is it used today? Mail-in voting is not […]
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With the Iowa caucuses just days away, state election officials from around the country gathered this week in Washington, D.C., to drill for cyberattacks, study ransomware and learn how to work with ethical hackers. The level of collaboration was unthinkable four years ago, when Russia-backed hackers and trolls interfered to the electoral process. Then, it took many months for federal officials to notify states that their systems had been targeted, and states bristled at the Department of Homeland Security’s 2017 designation of election systems as critical infrastructure. Now, federal and state officials are mapping out how a foreign adversary might try to undermine the democratic process, and practicing how they would thwart those attacks. “We’re light years ahead today from where we were [in the aftermath of 2016]” Mac Warner, the secretary of state of West Virginia, said Thursday at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference. Warner said […]
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The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have issued an advisory to state election officials that the Russian government could use voter suppression tactics in an attempt to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election, according to U.S and state officials familiar with the memo. The advisory sent this week to states’ secretaries of state and security advisers cautions that Moscow could try to keep Americans away from the polls next year by, for example, trying to breach voter registration databases or fanning political tensions online, said the officials familiar with memo, which is titled, “Russia May Try to Discourage Voter Turnout and Suppressing Votes in 2020 US Election.” The document is marked “For Official Use Only.” The officials described the advisory as a proactive effort to stay on top of the threat. “We want to make sure we’re pushing out as much information as possible to the front lines,” a senior Trump administration […]
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Federal, state and local officials who oversee election infrastructure and security are optimistic about their ability to share information that’s needed to protect elections from malicious actors. At a Thursday panel hosted by the Center for Internet Security, individuals representing the Department of Homeland Security, state secretaries of state, and state election directors discussed the progress they’ve made on election security coordination since 2016. “The Department of Homeland security and the U.S. government are so involved in election security because starting in 2016, we really did assess that the threat of something happening to our elections was relatively high,” said Bob Kolasky, DHS’s acting undersecretary of the National Protection and Programs Directorate. “That does not mean that the risk to our elections systems has to be high.” When the U.S. intelligence community concluded in January 2017 that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, the DHS designated election systems as part of the country’s critical infrastructure. Kolasky acknowledged that […]
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Election officials are pushing back against a new Harvard study saying hackers could disenfranchise Americans in 35 states and the District of Columbia by exploiting vulnerabilities in online voter registration systems. The study published Wednesday in the journal Technology Science says hackers could buy — either from commercial data brokers or more cheaply from cybercriminals — all the personal data they need about millions of Americans to fraudulently alter voter registration records online. Calling it “voter identity theft,” journal Editor-in-Chief Latanya Sweeney, who is also a Harvard professor, and co-authors Ji Su Yoo and Jinyan Zang say a broad scale attack on several states could be carried out with data costing just a few thousand dollars. But state elections officials told CyberScoop the report was overblown. “The study doesn’t reflect the safeguards that the states have in place to guard against this sort of thing,” said Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, this year’s president of the National […]
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Despite new evidence from a leaked NSA report that Russian hackers sought to compromise state and local election technology, the officials in charge are still vigorously opposing the federal designation of their polling systems as critical infrastructure. “It’s unclear how this situation would change anyone’s opinions about the [critical infrastructure] designation,” Kay Stimson of the National Association of Secretaries of State told CyberScoop. NASS represents the state-level officials responsible for tabulating election results. Stimson added that officials didn’t get any additional resources to defend their networks as a result of the January 2017 announcement by the Department of Homeland Security, which many saw as a federal power grab. Federal officials have stressed that state or local participation in any DHS programs is voluntary, and suggested that DHS expertise might be able to help election officials secure themselves against online attacks. Stimson said officials had asked DHS for a briefing about the leaked information. The document, leaked […]
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