The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, is beefing up its information sharing with state officials about disinformation.
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Election Day will put to the test four years of U.S. preparations to block a cyberattack on its voting systems. But officials face an immediate follow-up challenge: Disinformation that could become more damaging the longer it takes to declare a winner.
Federal, state and local governments are on high alert for false narratives aimed at discrediting electoral outcomes if key states take days to tally votes. Election officials say they have spent recent weeks finalizing plans to monitor and combat such campaigns, while social media companies are shoring up policies to limit the spread of such disinformation.
Existing political divisions, worries about the pandemic and flashbacks to Russian interference in 2016 could help foreign or domestic disinformations create more disruption than some cyberattacks themselves, former officials and cybersecurity experts say.
“I don’t think that there’s any doubt that the far greater threat, to both the security of our elections and our general democracy, is from disinformation,” said Glenn Gerstell, former general counsel of the National Security Agency. “[Attackers] don’t have to prove that they changed vote totals if they simply say they’ve changed vote totals.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, is beefing up its information sharing with state officials, and plans to hold rolling briefings with reporters on Election Day to separate real and fake threats. A “Rumor Control” page on its website is being used to fact check certain known kinds of disinformation, such as content suggesting that a change in vote tallies after Tuesday night is a sign that foreign attackers hacked the election.
“We remain confident that no foreign cyber actor can change your vote,” Christopher Krebs, the agency’s director, said in a YouTube video last week. “But that doesn’t mean various actors won’t try to introduce chaos into our elections and make sensationalist claims that overstate their capabilities.”
The key is communicating those nuances to voters before political campaigns or foreign governments act, cybersecurity experts say.
“The worst-case scenario is something happens and no one says anything, so [bad actors] can run with it,” said Marcus Fowler, director of strategic threat at cybersecurity firm Darktrace Ltd. and a former Central Intelligence Agency officer.
CISA has been updating state officials on hacking attempts including by an Iranian actor who allegedly targeted election websites last month, said Trevor Timmons, chief information officer for the Colorado Secretary of State. Mr. Timmons said his team also is corresponding with other state officials in a virtual situation room hosted by the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an intelligence-sharing consortium.
Three staffers dedicated to disinformation helped local governments in Colorado last month get verified statuses on social media platforms, Mr. Timmons said. When rumors that state Covid-19 restrictions would lead to closure of polling places circulated on Twitter last week, he said, his team pushed out accurate alerts that in-person voting would continue.
“Opinions are fun. Facts are better,” he said.
Federal, state and local governments are on high alert for false narratives aimed at discrediting electoral outcomes if key states take days to tally votes.
Photo: Jack Kurtz/Zuma Press
Mr. Timmons said his disinformation team primarily is looking for media in the coming days that is “overtly associated with Russia, China and Iran,” rather than misleading claims from domestic actors such as political campaigns or adherents to the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Social media platforms have made tweaks to catch or limit the spread of false and misleading content. Twitter said Monday it may label tweets about results by candidates and U.S.-based accounts with more than 100,000 followers as premature, if they are sent before local officials or national media outlets call the election. The platform in recent days also has labeled as manipulated media a tweet from former Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell purporting to show Democratic nominee Joe Biden without a mask, while indoors during the pandemic, and a deceptively edited video suggesting Mr. Biden addressed the wrong state at a recent rally.
Facebook Inc. similarly will label content that portrays mail-in voting as fraudulent and notify users if a candidate declares victory prematurely. The company, which stopped selling new political ads last week, previously has warned of foreign attackers overstating their capabilities in order to create confusion.
Such “perception hacking” may be particularly effective given the political partisanship and social divisions that have come to the fore in a hotly contested presidential race, said Rep. Jim Langevin (D., R.I.), co-founder of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus.
“[Attackers] gain an advantage when they can sow doubt and fear,” he said.
Write to David Uberti at [email protected]
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