Election security status: Some progress on ballot integrity, but…

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With the election less than two months away, government and election officials say voting itself is more secure, but Russian disinformation remains largely unaddressed.
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The presidential election in 2016 was a wake-up call that the security of the country’s election infrastructure can never again be considered a sure thing. During the last presidential campaign, Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee’s network and stole emails from Clinton campaign officials while also breaking into at least two county voting systems in Florida. Those digital security attacks took place alongside destructive disinformation campaigns that ran on vulnerable and unprepared social media networks.

At this year’s Billington Cybersecurity Summit, 55 days before the next presidential election, experts weighed in on the progress, or lack thereof, that the US has made in securing America’s elections since 2016.

Chris Krebs, head of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), told attendees that three-and-a-half years after he joined the agency it has “turned the corner in a really meaningful way” on cybersecurity. “We’re working in all 50 states on a regular basis to share information, to secure their systems, to ensure that they have all the resources they need to be prepared, whether it’s a COVID environment or non-COVID environment.”

Matthew Masterson, senior cybersecurity advisor at CISA, says his group is hard at work on supporting the more than 8,800 officials who run the country’s elections. Many of the voting jurisdictions are small but many election offices represent the largest IT operations in their counties in terms of total number of assets.

This article appeared in CSO Online. To read the rest of the article please visit here.

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