Cyber Work podcast: Election security issues for 2020

Introduction

In this episode of Infosec’s Cyber Work Podcast series, host Chris Sienko spoke with Adam Darrah about foreign vote tampering and other election security concerns for the upcoming 2020 election. 

Adam is the Director of Intelligence at Vigilante ATI and an expert on Eurasian political and social machinations, with a focus on Russia and disinformation campaigns. He previously acted as the Director of Intelligence at Infoarmor and worked for the federal government for eight years, filling in knowledge gaps regarding national security matters.

What kinds of security breaches, tampering and issues actually happened in the 2018 election?

First, Adam provides some context on election operations from an intelligence perspective in the lead up to the 2016 elections. There are three areas of intelligence: human, signals (which is where adversaries eavesdrop on our communications) and open-source information (which is where disinformation campaigns fall). Open-source can be offensive or defensive and 2016 was the first time we saw foreign governments aggressively expand into this area of intelligence. 

There weren’t many noteworthy news stories about issues from the 2018 election. For some reason, there weren’t many attempts to misinform voters, and it’s almost like they purposely got their hand caught in the cookie jar in 2016 to send us a message. Adam believes this was because our adversaries are sophisticated and pivot fast, so they most likely just moved onto the next way they will try to destabilize our democratically-elected government.

Are there still any problems that have not been rectified since 2018? Are there new attack vectors?

In short, yes. Adam is not a cynic; he believes that what is great about this country is that we uphold the rule of law, not rule by law or arbitrary enforcement of the law. Enemies of this country still enjoy freedom (Read more...)