Forest Global Training Partners

Cyber Risks · Cisco Talos

Let's Destroy Democracy

Summary: Cisco Talos researchers, writing from the perspective of an adversary, lay out four scenarios for attacking U.S. elections, including breaching a voter registration database to deregister 10 percent of one party's voters or altering ePollbooks so voters must cast provisional ballots. The piece traces the current attack surface to the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which passed the House 357-48 and the Senate 92-2, allocated $3.65 billion, and required states to build centralized computerized voter registration databases.

What's compelling: The article notes more than 8,000 U.S. election jurisdictions, each run by people who wait at least a year between the main event and must pull it off on one day with no failure, and that HAVA funding is not guaranteed every year, leaving states to fund maintenance themselves. It also cites $380 million in new HAVA funding, the first since 2010, as the scale of what defenders have to work with.

Read the original at Cisco Talos ↗

Topics
Malware
Related