Super Tuesday: Election Cybersecurity Survey

A recent survey by computer security firm CRITICALSTART showed 66 percent of Super Tuesday voters said they fear the elections aren’t secure — with many believing one of the campaigns would seek to influence the election and others concerned a foreign power, like Russia, might try to interfere.

Jordan Mauriello, CRITICALSTART Senior Vice President of Managed Security, warned that cyberattacks — like denial of service attacks that seek to slow voting computers and other infrastructure through increased traffic — are simple for attackers to pull off and can be difficult to discern from common technical difficulties or other errors.

“Outside of getting honesty from the people who run the infrastructure, there is no way to tell the difference between a technical issue, a bug, an outage, something that is intentionally being disrupted,” he told UPI.

The survey found almost half of voters said paper ballots would make them more confident in the accuracy of elections — and Mauriello acknowledged electronic voting machines, which print bar codes as a mark of accuracy, can be manipulated.

“There’s no way for a human to really validate that a bar code is accurate, so if somebody were to compromise that system and manipulate what it actually writes on the bar code, people would never know the difference.”

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Featured in UPI | March 3, 2020