Episode 194: What Happened To All The Election Hacks?

Today marks two weeks since Election Day 2020 in the U.S., when tens of millions went to the polls on top of the tens of millions who had voted early or by mail in the weeks leading up to November 3. The whole affair was expected to be a hot mess of suffrage, what with a closely divided public and access to the world’s most powerful office hung on the outcome of voting in a few, key districts sprinkled across a handful of states. Election attacks seemed a foregone conclusion. Election Attack, Anyone? Memories of the 2016 Presidential contest are still fresh in the minds of U.S. voters. During that contest, stealthy disinformation operations linked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency are believed to have swayed the vote in a few, key states, helping to hand the election to GOP upstart Donald Trump by a few thousands of votes spread across four states. Listen: Russian Hacking and the Future of Cyber Conflict Adam Meyers is the Vice President of Threat intelligence at the firm Crowdstrike. In 2020, with social media networks like Facebook more powerful than ever and the geopolitical fortunes of global powers like China and Russia hanging in the balance, it was a foregone conclusion that this year’s U.S. election would see one or more cyber incidents grab headlines and – just maybe- play a part in the final outcome.   But two weeks and more than 140 million votes later, wild conspiracy theories about vote tampering are rampant in right wing media. But predictions of cyber attacks on the U.S. presidential election have fallen flat. From Russia with…Indifference? So what happened? Did Russia, China and Iran decide to sit this one our, or were planned attacks stopped in their tracks? And what about the expected plague of ransomware? Did budget and talent constrained local governments manage to do just enough right to keep cyber criminals and nation state actors at bay?  Allan Liska is a Threat Intelligence Analyst at the firm Recorded Future, To find out we invited two experts who have been following election security closely into the Security Ledger studios to talk. Allan Liska is a Threat Intelligence Analyst at the firm Recorded Future, which has been monitoring the cyber underground for threats to elections systems. Joining Allan is a frequent Security Ledger podcast guest: Adam Meyers the Senior Vice President of Threat Intelligence at the firm Crowdstrike back into the studio as well. Crowdstrike investigated the 2016 attack on the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and closely monitors a wide range of cyber criminal and nation state groups that have been linked to attacks on campaigns and elections infrastructure.  To start out I asked both guests – given the anticipation of hacks targeting the US election – what happened – or didn’t happen – in 2020.  As always,  you can check our full conversation in our latest Security Ledger podcast at Blubrry.