With less than four months to go before the 2020 elections, the United States is not seeing the same scale of cyber threats as in the last presidential election, a senior National Security official said Friday.
“Compared to things in 2016, we’re not seeing that level of coordinated and determined cyber activity from adversaries,” Chris Krebs, director of the National Security cybersecurity arm, said in a live-broadcast panel discussion.
Russia’s 2016 election interference campaign was multifaceted and took months to complete. In April of that year, her military intelligence had hacked the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and the Democratic Congress Campaign Committee. By June, they had created the character “Guccifer 2.0” to wash those stolen files. In July, they hacked into the Illinois state voter registration database.
US electoral cyber security has improved dramatically since early 2017, when Homeland Security first reclassified elections as critical infrastructure. Krebs touted his agency’s work with state and local election officials, including persuading many to install sensors that monitor potentially malicious cyber activity.
“We have better visibility across all networks, and we’re just not seeing the level of activity that we saw in 2016,” said Krebs, director of Homeland’s Cyber Security and Infrastructure Agency.
Krebs cautioned, however, that this did not stop Russia or another actor, such as criminal ransomware operators, from trying to interfere in the meantime.
“I am not only speaking until November 3, but in that period after the elections,” he said, adding that the system is “absolutely ripe for the destructive or disruptive attack of a capable adversary, so we must be prepared.” . “
“That’s why we put so much emphasis on paper backups and system audibility,” said Krebs.
