The security of our elections is top of mind for practically every voter in the US. With the state primaries underway, all eyes are on our electronic (and in some cases mobile) voting systems to understand if malicious attacks are happening — and if our systems are able to defend against them. Most experts agree that we are unprepared and underfunded when it comes to securing our elections — which should concern us all.
A big problem is that when we look at the entire ecosystem of the national election process, we don't treat it the same way we treat business systems. This is a mistake. Voting is a business of our state governments. And the most valuable asset for states is voter information — similar to the customer information and data assets of a for-profit business (which are increasingly safeguarded by data privacy regulations). To modernize our current model of election management, trust, and security, it's important to examine three interrelated pillars for state governments: technology, people, and attitudes.
1. Technology: Making Cybersecurity More ProactiveTo address the growing security threats that many players in the broader election system ecosystem face, proactive cybersecurity technology and policy must take center stage in three important ways:
Cybersecurity hygiene of individual companies and agenciesGreater transparency and data-driven assessments of election system hardware and software providers should be mandated in order to measure each company's cybersecurity hygiene against an established baseline. In addition, there needs to be increased monitoring of the deployment and implementation of technology in state and local election systems to ensure that misconfigurations aren't creating additional vulnerabilities.
A "layered defense" approach to cybersecurityGiven the complicated, interdependent nature ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
