Interagency collaboration has informed a focus on defending election night reporting and voter registration databases from ransomware attacks by Russian adversaries, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Christopher Krebs told attendees of the annual Black Hat information security conference Wednesday.
“What we’ve been able to do is distill down their target sets,” he said. “When we look in certain corners of the world where the Russians are active, we can figure out what they’re going after there, so we can bring that understanding back here and harden, spend that last dollar.”
Krebs credited the strength of CISA’s partnerships across the federal government, particularly with the National Security Agency and Cyber Command. In particular, he said, information gathered by Cyber Command, which has worked on proactive defensive measures with partners in Ukraine, northern Macedonia and Montenegro, led CISA to launch a ransomware initiative for election security last summer that’s focussed on those internet-connected systems.
“We bring that understanding back,” he said “and that’s what’s behind the ransomware initiative launched last year which is about protecting those things that are connected, and hardening them as best we can.”
Krebs outlined a number of reasons to be optimistic about the 2020 election, noting that compared to where the country was this time four years ago, the difference is “like night and day.”
In addition to establishing structures for election officials to communicate about threats and best practices, and sensors to detect intrusions set up in all 50 states, Krebs highlighted that 92 percent of jurisdictions have paper-based back-up systems to enable audits and resilience of the process in the event something goes wrong.
But with the emergence of the pandemic, the most important factor in election security is the individual voter.
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