Cybersecurity
Threats known and unknown loom in 2020 elections
U.S. cybersecurity officials are gearing up to prevent foreign malign influence campaigns from impacting the 2020 vote.
Experts are divided over whether local election officials and federal agencies should expect the same type of threats targeting election infrastructure and online discourse as they experienced in 2016 or if they should expect the unexpected.
On Election Day in 2018, federal officials said they had no indication that voting infrastructure was successfully targeted by cyberattacks or other efforts at manipulation designed to strike voters from the rolls, change vote counts or hinder officials from completing election tallies.
But the issue of influence campaigns and as yet unknown vectors of attack remain ripe for discussion as the nation heads into the 2020 vote.
Matthew Masterson, a senior advisor at DHS who focuses on election security, said at an April 23 cybersecurity conference that he spends “a lot of time thinking through that undermining confidence [angle] and ways that we…
