American elections are safe from hacking due to the isolated nature of voting systems, but that could soon change due to the threat posed by growing centralization and interconnectivity of infrastructure, cybersecurity firm Flashpoint said on Monday.
“The U.S. election landscape is made up of approximately 9,000 different state and local jurisdictions, providing a patchwork of laws, standards, processes, and voting machines,” Ian Gray, an intelligence analyst for the firm, noted in a blog post. “This environment is a formidable challenge to any actor, nation-state or not, who seeks to substantially influence or alter the outcome of an election.”
Noting cyberattacks against American political institutions that have been traced to the Russian government, Gray said it might be possible to spread disinformation and undermine confidence in the current election, but that fears that hackers might change vote totals were overblown.
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“Vote tampering during the upcoming election is highly unlikely and confidence in the U.S. voting system will remain strong,” he predicted. “The knowledge of possible state-sponsored disinformation campaigns helps to dispel their influence over the outcome of the vote. Further, our federated and heterogeneous national voting systems helps to protect the electoral process in the face of foreign influence campaigns.”
He said that could change as systems become increasingly connected. “The resilience in our election system currently rests within the plurality and structure of the current systems, but as information technology continues to connect more devices to the Internet, this may not always be true for future elections.”
Hackers this year successfully penetrated voter registration systems in Illinois, and failed in an attempt to hack systems in Arizona. Flashpoint noted its analysts have observed information obtained from voter databases advertised for sale on the “Dark Web,” accessible to users who mask their Internet protocol addresses. The information obtained from those systems is distinct from election voting systems, where actual vote totals are retained.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson began encouraging state officials to join his department as part of a voluntary partnership to monitor election integrity in August, shortly after the discovery of the incidents in Arizona and Illinois. The effort was panned by some critics who said it was an attempt to “nationalize” the election.
