How Cyberattacks and Disinformation Threaten Democracy

At last calendar week's Code Conference, 2 of the sessions provided sobering looks at how vulnerable our election systems are to the threat of cyberattacks. Senator Mark Warner warned of future attacks on voting systems, and former Section of Defense Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach suggested that such attacks may actually endanger republic.

Sen. Warner, who is vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, addressed the Facebook information-sharing issue, but seemed more concerned about future cyberattacks.

"Nigh everyone" agrees that Russian federation massively intervened in the election by infiltrating the systems of both campaigns, scanning or breaking into the electoral systems of 21 states, and using social media to spread disinformation, he said. We should have been able to anticipate more of this, he said, equally many of the tactics they used in 2022 were tactics they had previously tested in Ukraine, Republic of estonia, and other places.

I thought his view that our election systems "are not safe plenty" was notable, and he said that every voting automobile should have a paper trail, as well as enhanced security.

Sen. Warner, who co-founded Nextel Wireless, is concerned we're buying a 20th century military, and said that while the US spends $700 billion on the military compared with $68 billion spent by the Russians, "in the area of cyber, they are our equal." He said that for the past 15 years, the U.s.a. "has non had a cyber doctrine," in part because we were concerned nearly escalation. Even so, Russia and Cathay, in areas ranging from intellectual belongings theft to tampering with central systems, take been "stealing u.s.a. blind." He believes at that place should be an international convention nearly which tools are allowed, and which are not.

The committee that asked questions of Facebook CEO Marking Zuckerberg was "an embarrassment," Sen. Warner argued. In that location is cipher inherently Democratic or Republican about a national security strategy with a cyber component—and the same is true when it comes to regulating social media. Facebook's new transparency tools were pretty good, he admitted, but transparency on paid political ads isn't enough. He said fake accounts were last year's problem, and today he'south worried about deepfakes. In the 21st century, "conflict will be less rockets firing at each other, but more misinformation and disinformation."

Sen. Warner said he worries that if there's some other bad upshot, Congress may overreact. He didn't take a firm answer as to what should be washed—at that place is "no ideal solution," he said—but suggested a focus on identity, privacy, and competition. "The last thing I'd like to exercise is kneecap American companies when we take Chinese companies one step behind."

Defending Digital Democracy

Eric Rosenbach, currently of the Harvard Kennedy Schoolhouse and formerly Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense and Assistant Secretary of Defence force in charge of the department's cyber strategy, gave a presentation on "defending digital democracy."

Rosenbach ran through a hypothetical scenario in which Due north Korea disrupted the 2022 US midterm elections. He noted that at DOD, "the country that worried me the most was North korea," in part because information technology was and so unpredictable.

In his presentation, Rosenbach described where we're vulnerable, and said that the ballot systems of the various states are "very vulnerable." The people who administer these systems are accustomed to dealing with things like power failures, but are not prepared to gainsay a nation-state in cyber warfare. And Rosenbach said that social media systems, fifty-fifty though they are changing, are still vulnerable to "info-ops," which includes things such as sending simulated messages for social engineering efforts.

A few years ago, people were talking nigh how engineering science was aiding republic, just now trends are pushing against the open internet, as exemplified past things like the "Cracking Firewall" in China and efforts in Russia to command the information surroundings.

In general, Rosenbach said, engineering science helps democracy, but it likewise makes democracy more vulnerable, equally it creates a "big attack surface for the bad guys."

Rosenbach asked the audience to prioritize securing their data. "Republic needs tech's aid," he said.