Report: State Election Officials ‘Woefully Unprepared’ For November 8th Cyber Attack

With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, a grim report from POLITICO is showing how unprepared many state election officials are in the case of a cyber disruption or planned attack of some kind.

The report indicates that state officials have “been slow and ill staffed to develop contingency plans responsive to a hack attack,” though plans for other disasters have largely been taken into consideration, including storms and other forms of physical attacks.

But in the ever-expanding cyber space arena — a place where virtually everyone is connected but few know the true depths of its infrastructure — the risks of a catastrophic coordinated attack remain high in the opinions of many.

Officials in key battleground states acknowledged, “there are limits to what they can control, and they recognize they face legitimate challenges from cyber intrusions to the myriad adjacent parts that go into an election, including online registration records and publicizing vote tallies,” writes POLITICO’s Darren Samuelson.

Concerns over a coordinated cyber block of some kind that could have a severe Election Day impact have risen considerably ever since a carefully crafted DDoS attack blacked out the internet in large swaths of the country last week. The attack — “the largest of its kind in history,” according to some experts — impacted sites like Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, Spotify, CNN, and even (GASP!) Mediaite.

Cyber concerns are front and center in the news cycles these days anyway as it relates to the hacked personal Gmail account of Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta. It is largely believed that Russian-backed hacking efforts are responsible for providing the information to the website WikiLeaks, which to date has released over 35,000 emails from the Podesta archives.

Maine’s Democratic Secretary Matthew Dunlap identified what would happen in the worst case scenario, saying you, “[make] everyone register again…We could do it. It’d be an enormous undertaking. That’s how fail safe our system is that you can’t shut down our election.”
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J.D. Durkin (@jiveDurkey) is an editorial producer and columnist at Mediaite.
[h/t POLITICO]