Officials and citizen watchdogs are working to prevent hacking of the 2020 elections. But can they do enough?
In 2016, American democracy was hacked. Can cybersecurity prevent meddling next time?
Russian hackers have been tied to interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential elections and 2018 midterm elections, breaching two of Florida's 67 counties' election systems, and hacking the Democratic National Committee networks.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had been increasingly concerned about Russia's continued activity in the U.S. during and after the 2018 midterm elections, The New York Times has reported. The Times reported her concerns fell on deaf ears, leaving less experienced White House aides to deal with the issue.
Christopher Krebs, Director of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is now charged with preparing for all possibilities. His agency's new Protect 2020 initiative will focus on developing cybersecurity priorities for state and local election officials, auditing elections, and patching vulnerabilities in election systems, The Hill reported.
The DHS has aggressively turned toward protecting the integrity of state and local election infrastructure, the agency says. DHS continues to work with election officials in 46 states to install Albert sensors, which track network activity and search for specific threats. The technology directly feeds the details regarding any incidents through a nonprofit cyber-intelligence data exchange before reaching DHS. But the sensors do have weaknesses, including a lack of encryption and the ability to gain access with stolen passwords.
Assisting election officials is also what Craig Newmark and th ..
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