Security News
A recent attack on Tyler Technologies, a software provider for local governments across the US, highlighted the concerns held across the nation and left many to wonder if the software providers in charge of presidential election data might suffer a similar fate. The best defense also integrates cybersecurity and data protection, as removing segmentation streamlines the process of detecting and responding to attacks, while simultaneously recovering systems and data.
An election security report released by Valimail exposed some significant issues with email security which could have the potential to disrupt the 2020 elections. Just 7% of the largest counties' domains are protected, an increase of just 2 percentage points from 2019.Only one of the eight election systems manufacturers certified by the US government is protected from email spoofing.
Hackers seeking to sow chaos in the November 3 election are hard at work - but some experts say they don't need to be successful to have an impact. Simply the perception of breaching election systems could have the same effect of undermining confidence in the outcome and opening the door to discrediting the results.
Through disinformation campaigns, foreign adversaries attempt to exploit the fear and uncertainty among US voters, says Digital Shadows. The 2016 presidential election was marked by meddling most notably from Russian agents who attempted to influence voters through disinformation on social media and other platforms.
A ransomware attack that hobbled a Georgia county government in early October reportedly disabled a database used to verify voter signatures in the authentication of absentee ballots. According to a report in the Gainesville Times, the attack also disabled the county's voter signature database.
That presents a fresh set of security concerns, which include a lack of transparency over the security measures and voter auditing applied to each type of voting method. The lack of resources needed to adapt and secure the mail-in voting process by the early November election date is has been another cause for concern.
Ransomware gangs have officially entered the 2020 election fray, with reports of one of the first breaches of the voting season, on Hall County, Ga. The county's database of voter signatures was impacted in the attack along with other government systems. Although the county said the voting process hasn't been impacted by the ransomware attack, the incident is a warning to other municipalities to lock down their systems, particularly in these last days leading up to the election.
SecurityScorecard released a report earlier this month that looked through the overall cybersecurity posture of all 56 US states and territories leading up to the presidential election. The study found that 75% of all states and territories had IT infrastructures that are vulnerable to a variety of cyberattacks.
Attacks growing increasingly sophisticated and destructive. As eCrime groups grow more powerful, these attacks have grown increasingly sophisticated and destructive - respondents reported that 82 percent of attacks now involve instances of counter incident response, and 55 percent involve island hopping, where an attacker infiltrates an organization's network to launch attacks on others within the supply chain.
With the U.S. presidential elections a mere few weeks away, the security industry is hyper-aware of security vulnerabilities in election infrastructure, cyberattacks against campaign staffers and ongoing disinformation campaigns. The good news, Olney, said in a recent video interview with Threatpost, is that awareness of election-security threats has increased since the 2016 elections.