Election Officials Have Been Largely Successful in Deterring Cyber Threats, CISA Official Says – By Edward Graham (Nextgov) / Sept 2, 2022
The head of CISA’s National Risk Management Center pointed to public-private partnerships and enhanced resource sharing activities as key to defending against outside threats to voting systems.
Increased coordination between federal agencies, election officials, and private sector election vendors has helped deter an influx of cyber threats directed at U.S. voting systems, an election official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said on Thursday during an event hosted by the Election Assistance Commission and Pepperdine University.
Mona Harrington, the acting assistant director of CISA’s National Risk Management Center—which includes the agency’s election security team—said that since election systems were designated as critical infrastructure in 2017, “the attacks have become much more sophisticated and the volume of attacks has certainly increased.” But with the partnerships that CISA and election officials have built, along with the products and services currently being used to mitigate potential risks, election officials have many of the tools needed to deter both nation state actors and non-nation state adversaries.
Harrington noted that all 50 states have deployed CISA-funded or state-funded intrusion detection sensors in their systems, known as Albert sensors, and that hundreds of election officials and private sector election infrastructure partners have signed up for a range of CISA’s cybersecurity services, from recurring scanning of their systems for known vulnerabilities on internet-connected infrastructure to more in-depth penetration testing.
“Technology and the evolving threat landscape has shaped the role of election officials, and election officials have seen a significant expansion of their duties beyond simple election administration to a position more akin to technology and information managers and IT managers,” Harrington said.
