In early 2020, federal officials changed how they communicated with states about cyber-intrusions affecting election infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency and the FBI would now inform senior state officials, and not just IT personnel, of election-related hacking incidents in a given state.
Some state officials, who had criticized the federal government for being too slow and not specific enough in sharing data on Russian hacking in 2016, welcomed the new policy as another guardrail against foreign interference in 2020. And in March, at the height of the primary season, the policy was put into action.