US officials tasked with protecting election security say they are monitoring threats from multiple groups and countries. And in recent months, social media companies and cybersecurity researchers have identified Chinese influence operations targeting the election.
“More attention to securing voting systems has not eliminated the critical technical and human threats to our elections,” said Matthew Weil, executive director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Democracy Program. “And this cycle is practice for 2024.”
The federal government has been working since 2016 to improve coordination with state and local officials on everything from fixing digital vulnerabilities to promoting reliable sources of information. Biden administration officials say that’s one reason they’ve seen less foreign interference than in 2016.
But as CISA Director Jen Easterly, whose agency leads federal election security efforts, recently told reporters, “The current election threat environment is more complex than it’s ever been.” She mentioned the ways in which different threats overlap, from cyber attacks to disinformation to harassment of election officials.
Here are the threats to watch as the final mandate votes are cast.
Misinformation and misinformation
Lies and conspiracy theories about the security of election systems are of greatest concern to election watchdogs and federal cybersecurity and intelligence officials, because those lies can fuel mistrust that discourages people from voting and provoke anger that fuels them. people threaten violence against election administrators.
Russia sowed disruption during the 2016 campaign, and federal agencies recently warned that foreign actors could once again spread lies about alleged hacks of election systems. But in recent years, domestic sources of misinformation and disinformation have become the most widespread and powerful threat. Election-related lies are ubiquitous in right-wing circles, and foreign adversaries eagerly exploit these lies whenever possible.
US officials remain on alert for false notices of rescheduled elections or corrupted ballots from fake email addresses and websites claiming to represent election offices; false claims of hacked voter data; or last-minute thefts and leaks of campaign communications.
And while misinformation gets a lot of attention because it is spread intentionally, honest mistakes by poll workers at the polls and glitches such as voting machine outages can lead to innocent misunderstandings that generate misinformation.
Damage to election office and campaign websites
Hackers have a relatively low-tech means of throwing campaigns off balance and disrupting voters’ access to reliable election information: forcing websites to crash using automated tools that simulate massive floods of people visiting those sites. .
Some major tech companies, including Cloudflare and Google, offer free protection against these “distributed denial of service attacks” for election offices and political campaigns, but many websites remain vulnerable.
A Russian DDoS campaign recently knocked several state government websites offline, although those attacks did not specifically target election sites.
Fortunately, DDoS attacks only temporarily disrupt sites and do not mean that there are weaknesses in computer networks that would expose servers to more serious types of attacks, such as data theft or corruption.
The federal government has urged the public not to overreact to DDoS attacks, noting that election websites operate separately from the databases that store voting records and records.
However, eleventh-hour website outages can present problems for political campaigns or election officials hoping to promote critical messages — such as campaign talking points, polling place updates or encouragement to stay in line — at the minute. The last.
Campaign social media account hijacking
Hackers can take over the social media accounts of candidates or campaigns on Election Day and make inflammatory comments designed to turn away voters or spread false information about how and when to vote. These impersonation schemes can foster distrust in the electoral process and throw campaigns off balance in the main part of the race.
The specter of target account hijacking is not theoretical. Twitter already experienced a massive hack in July 2020, in which a teenager took over accounts belonging to politicians, business leaders and other celebrities – including then-candidate Joe Biden. And now the launch of mass layoffs by Twitter owner Elon Musk has sparked fears that cuts could hit the company’s security team.
“Account security is especially important in an election — it would be disastrous to turn candidates into sock puppets,” said Eddie Perez, a board member at the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan election technology nonprofit. Perez was previously director of product management at Twitter overseeing a team that handled issues of “civic integrity”..
Cyber attacks on voter registration databases
States have spent years improving the security of their voter registration databases, which form the foundation of a well-functioning election system. But no technology is completely secure, and vulnerabilities are likely to remain in some countries’ networks. Russian hackers breached Illinois’ voter database in 2016, and Iranian hackers broke into a state database in 2020.
Hackers with access to the voter registration system can wreak havoc in two ways. By tampering with voter records, they can make it harder or more time-consuming for poll workers to check voters at the polls. And by stealing voter data, hackers can engage in targeted harassment.
However, many states print hard copies of voter rolls and distribute them to local officials, creating a backup source of information they can use to check voters if the electronic database fails or becomes unreliable.
Federal officials recently said that cyberattacks on election infrastructure would not be able to corrupt voter records, disrupt voting or alter results.
Targeted voter harassment
This relatively new threat represents an evolution in how foreign governments use hacking campaigns to interfere in US elections. After stealing voter information from a state election database in 2020, Iranian operatives threatened those voters with unspecified consequences if they did not vote to re-elect then-President Donald Trump. The messages, which contained false claims of vulnerabilities in election technology, were designed to appear to come from the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group.
The US government quickly linked Tehran to the emails, alerted election officials to them and publicly disclosed the campaign. Federal prosecutors subsequently charged two Iranian men over the operation.
It’s unclear how effective the messages were in persuading victims to vote for Trump, so Tehran and other US adversaries may not try again. However, be on the lookout for similar pushy emails.
Wireless modems that enable voting machine tampering or vote counting
At least seven states and Washington, DC, use wireless modems to transmit unofficial election night results to their headquarters. These modems use telecommunications networks that are vulnerable to hackers, and malicious actors can use them to manipulate unofficial voting data, corrupt voting machines, or compromise computers used to count official results.
“Now we have to worry about whether someone is going to have access to a communications network that is fundamentally open,” Matt Blaze, a Georgetown University computer science and law professor who studies voting systems, told POLITICO last month.
These attacks are much more difficult and time-consuming – and thus much less likely to happen – than spreading falsehoods on social media or temporarily taking down websites. And states that use paper ballots and post-election audits are likely to catch and correct erroneous results.
However, temporarily inaccurate information can raise doubts about the results, especially if hackers brag about their achievements. And if subsequent audits that correct the digital tampering dramatically change the number of votes, bad faith actors can exploit those changes to falsely claim fraud.
