This year, Canada, multiple European nations, and others will host high profile elections. The topic of cyber-enabled threats disrupting and targeting elections has become an increasing area of awareness for governments and citizens globally. To develop solutions and security programs to counter cyber threats to elections, it is important to begin with properly categorizing the threat. In this post, we’ll explore the various threats to elections FireEye has observed and provide a framework for organizations to sort these activities.
Historically, FireEye has observed targeting of a wide range of organizations connected to elections. In considering their role and criticality to the process of elections, these various entities can be grouped into three categories: core election infrastructure, supporting organizations involved in the administration of elections, and other groups that have a participatory role in the electoral process. All of these entities may be targeted for a variety of reasons to influence or collect intelligence on the electoral process and participants.
Although we have not observed direct evidence that actors have manipulated the electoral process in any major national or regional election by infiltrating the systems or hardware used to record or tally votes, the sheer complexity of these systems prevents us from categorically stating that these systems have not been successfully compromised.
