We’ve covered 2020 election security and how much of the United States doesn’t seem serious about it. Apparently, the journalists at popular current events show 60 Minutes see the same sad trend in America right now.
Last Sunday’s episode covered Russian hacking of the 2016 U.S. elections with a focus on Congressional races.
That segment included a warning from former head of the FBI’s counterintelligence & cyber divisions Robert Anderson, who said the Russian hacking efforts as not a one-time thing.
Anderson said in the episode that he thinks the Russians will also threaten the 2020 election security.
Security company Synack’s co-founder and CEO Jay Kaplan echoed Anderson’s beliefs:
“This time around, cyberattacks are no longer considered fanciful conspiracy theories, but rather critical and imminent threats to the validity of our democracy. To combat these efforts, we need to encourage proactive third party security testing to find any and all security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by malicious actors.
“This security testing should engage security researchers who can provide an adversarial perspective on a system and should include responsible disclosure. My big concern, quite frankly, is losing confidence in the integrity of our votes. Once one vote is compromised, I think it puts our entire electoral system into jeopardy.”
Synack recently launched the Secure the Election Initiative during the 2018 midterms.
For the initiative, Synack worked with a network of vetted hackers based in the US and allied NATO countries to help find and fix security flaws in voter registration databases.
Read Next: The U.S. Has a Plan to Minimize 2020 Election Hacking… And It’s Missing Something
Meanwhile, the U.S. government will soon launch an initiative to protect voter registration databases in order to minimize 2020 election hacking.
The problem with that effort, however, is that The systems the government aims to protect are the same voter eligibility machines which were compromised by Russian hackers in the 2016 election, according to a Reuters report.
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