Stay informed on election security with the latest updates on cyber threats, data protection, and integrity in the democratic process.
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Background for this topic.
Election is a legally governed process for choosing public officials or deciding a question through voting, with rules for registration, ballot creation, voting, counting, and certification. Its cybersecurity scope includes the digital systems supporting those stages—not only voting devices, but voter-registration databases, election-management systems, poll-worker accounts, result-reporting networks, and public information services.
Security priorities are preserving vote and result integrity, keeping essential services available, and protecting voter and worker information from unnecessary exposure. Material risks include unauthorized changes to ballot definitions or tallies, compromise of privileged accounts, disruption of reporting systems, and exploitation of software or network vulnerabilities. Defenses include least-privilege access, multifactor authentication, network separation, tested backups, vulnerability management, and paper records or other independent evidence that supports verification. Election security also requires documented procedures for detecting, containing, and correcting incidents without undermining lawful certification.
Weekly headline count for the current query.
Hacking voting machines is so 2017. Phishing, impersonation pose the real election risks
Guess they could deny the alleged intrusion … like the 2020 election results
State-sponsored attackers joined by Chinese snoops and hackers-for-hire in latest round of economic penalties The Council of the European Union sanctioned Emennet Pasargad on Monday, a company used as a front for a series of Iranian cyberattacks.…
The shoemaker’s children have new friends The International Association for Cryptologic Research will run a second election for new board members and other officers, after it was unable to complete its first poll due to a lost encryption key.…
Labour accused of sneaking in plans it denied before the general election Seven campaign groups have written to UK prime minister Keir Starmer urging him to scrap plans for a mandatory digital identity system – a project that is expected to be announced imminently, as part an effort to tackle unauthorized migration.…
As the Trump administration guts efforts to counter election disinfo The Russian troll farm that in the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election posted a bizarro video claiming Democratic candidate Kamala Harris was a rhino poacher, is back with hundreds of new fake news websites serving up phony political commentary with an AI assist.…
'Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst,' one tells The Reg Feature Bill Gates, an Arizona election official and former Maricopa County supervisor, says that the death threats started shortly after the 2020 presidential election.…
Services coming back online after legacy systems compromised Oxford City Council says a cyberattack earlier this month resulted in 21 years of data being compromised.…
Plus AI in the infosec world, why CISA should know its place, and more Interview Russia appears to be having second thoughts on how aggressively, or at least how visibly, it attempts to influence American elections, according to a former head of the NSA.…
Agency tries to save face as it also pulls essential funding for election security initiatives The US cybersecurity agency is trying to save face by seeking to clear up what it's calling "inaccurate reporting" after a former senior pentester claimed it laid off the entire Red Team.…
Election infosec advisory agency also shuttered A penetration tester who worked at the US govt's CISA claims his 100-strong team was dismissed after Elon Musk's Trump-blessed DOGE unit cancelled a contract – and that more staff at the cybersecurity agency have also been let go.…
Also, Change Healthcare sets a record, cybercrime cop suspect indicted, a new Mallox decryptor, and more in brief Senate intelligence committee chair Mark Warner (D-VA) is demanding to know why, in the wake of the bust-up of a massive online Russian disinformation operation, the names of six US-based domain registrars seem to keep popping up as, at best, negligent facilitators of election meddling. …
Plus: Iran's IRGC probes election-related websites in swing states Russian, Iranian, and Chinese trolls are all ramping up their US election disinformation efforts ahead of November 5, but – aside from undermining faith in the democratic process and confidence in the election result – with very different objectives, according to Microsoft.…
Note to Xi: Marco and Ted Cruz aren't the same person China's Spamouflage disinformation crew has been targeting US Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida) with its fake news campaigns over the past couple of months, trolling the Republican lawmaker's official X account and posting negative stories about Rubio on Reddit and Medium.…
Propaganda op focuses on anti-West narratives to meddle with elections The US has placed a $10 million bounty on Russian media network Rybar and a number of its key staffers following alleged attempts to sway the upcoming US presidential election.…
It's election year for more than 50 countries and the Islamic Republic threatens a bunch of them US and UK national security agencies are jointly warning about Iranian spearphishing campaigns, which remain an ongoing threat to various industries and governments.…
Russia has seemingly decided who it wants Putin the Oval Office The Biden administration on Wednesday seized 32 websites and charged two employees of a state-owned media outlet connected to a $10 million scheme to distribute pro-Kremlin propaganda, and claimed the actions were necessary to counter Russia’s attempts to influence the upcoming US presidential election.…
No, Abbey is not really a "pure patriotic girl" Spamouflage, the Beijing-linked trolls known for spreading fake news about American politics, is back with new accounts on X and TikTok that claim to be frustrated US voters in "more aggressive" attempts to influence the upcoming presidential election.…
12 on X and one on Instagram caught in the crackdown OpenAI has banned ChatGPT accounts linked to an Iranian crew suspected of spreading fake news on social media sites about the upcoming US presidential campaign.…
US politicians and Israeli officials among the top targets for the IRGC’s cyber unit Google has joined Microsoft in publishing intel on Iranian cyber influence activity following a recent uptick in attacks that led to data being leaked from the Trump re-election campaign.…