Despite the U.S. government's efforts to chill everyone out about election hacking less than a month before the midterm elections, the topic is still on many minds.
According to a public service announcement, carried out on Tuesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said they are aware that, as far as they know, an election hack has never been successful in the United States, and that it's unlikely there will be one anytime soon if it strikes.
As stated in the announcement, "Neither the FBI nor CISA believes there is any evidence that cyber activity has prevented a registered voter from casting a ballot, compromised the integrity of any ballots cast, and affected the accuracy of voter registration information in their investigations" (emphasis in original). Considering the extensive safeguards in place and the distributed nature of election infrastructure, the FBI and the CISA continue to assess that it would be very difficult for any attempts to manipulate votes at scale to be unwittingly carried out."
There has been a persistent campaign by some pro-Trump and GOP operatives and sympathizers for the past two years, including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who spread unfounded conspiracy theories and sometimes even flat-out made-up claims of vote manipulation and hacking against voting systems across the country, leading to the announcement. Election security experts believe that the FBI and CISA's announcement appears to be all set to pre-empt these types of allegations.
Matt Bernhard, a research engineer at the non-profit organization Voting Works, which focuses on election cybersecurity, told Motherboard in an online chat that this feels like a pre-bunking exercise.
According to Professor Dan Wallach, an expert in electronic voting systems who taught at Rice University for many years. He has studied them; electronic voting systems are the future.
“If we take it for what it says, it both focuses our attention on misinformation and ‘pre-bunks’ more sophisticated hacking operations,” Dan told Motherboard via email.
It is pertinent to clarify, however, that “this does not mean we can relax about these sorts of sophisticated attacks. The election administrators are, to a specific degree, implementing cyber defenses, and they are currently working on improving them," he added. “Even though it is much easier to convince people that there has been tampering with the election than to do the tampering itself.”
Although election hacks have been rare and ineffective, and are unlikely, federal and state governments are prepared for any eventuality.
"At the Department of Homeland Security, we are very intensely focused on the security of the elections," Minister Mayorkas, who serves as the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said earlier this week.
There have been past reports on potential vulnerabilities in voting machines by Motherboard as well. However, there has not been any evidence that voting machines have been breached during an actual election that has happened in the past.
