A leading U.S. cyber official is warning that digital disruptions will occur surrounding the November election, but said government officials are prepared to meet the challenge.
Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, predicted that the looming cyber chaos will come to be seen as routine trouble akin to bad weather on Election Day.
But such an attack would not be a naturally occurring event and election officials are on high alert: Microsoft said Friday it has uncovered new efforts by Iranian government-linked groups to meddle in the 2024 campaign.
Ms. Easterly told the Black Hat USA 2024 hacker conference in Las Vegas this week she has confidence that “election infrastructure has never been more secure and the election stakeholder community has never been stronger.”
But even with her faith in America’s systems, she said Wednesday that headaches are bound to happen.
“I can guarantee that things will go wrong,” Ms. Easterly said at the conference. “A poll worker will forget their key to the polling location. Somebody will pull out the plug on the printer so they can plug in their hot pot to make lunch. There will be a storm, there will be a Distributed Denial of Service attack, there could be a ransomware attack.”
Last month, the CISA and the FBI issued a public warning of the prospect of Distributed Denial of Service attacks on election infrastructure and websites tied to the election. The service denial attacks overwhelm vulnerable systems with traffic prompting webpages to crash, and the agencies indicated unofficial vote tallies may be in the cyberattackers’ crosshairs.
The rare alarm came on the heels of the U.S. intelligence community revealing it observed foreign efforts to scan election infrastructure, although the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to give details of the foreign surveillance efforts in a briefing with reporters last month.
Ms. Easterly said the potential turmoil could be disruptive but will not affect the election’s integrity.
“Election officials are natural-born crisis managers,” she said at the Black Hat conference. “They have been doing this, they’ve been preparing for it for a long time. They know how to deal with these types of disruptions and they’ve been practicing it, preparing for it, and they will be able to respond to it.”
The intelligence community is closely watching activity from Russia, China and Iran related to the U.S. elections, and it has identified Tehran in particular as a likely “chaos agent.”
Microsoft said Friday it had detected what it said were Iranian government-connected groups laying the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election topics to influence U.S. voters, especially in critical swing states.
The tech giant said it also assessed that the groups have launched operations designed to collect intelligence on political campaigns.
Microsoft said one group launched “covert news sites” targeting voters on opposite ends of the political spectrum. One suspect website hurled insults at former President Donald Trump while another claimed to be a source for political conservatives with a focus on gender and sexuality.
A second Iranian group has been preparing to take more dramatic measures in the U.S. since March, according to Microsoft.
“We believe this group may be setting itself up for activities that are even more extreme, including intimidation or inciting violence against political figures or groups, with the ultimate goals of inciting chaos, undermining authorities, and sowing doubt about election integrity,” Microsoft said on its blog.
A third Iranian group sent a “spearphishing” email to a “high-ranking official on a presidential campaign” from the compromised account of a former senior adviser. The group also sought to log into “an account belonging to a former presidential candidate.”
Microsoft said a fourth Iranian group was trying to breach the account of a “county-level government employee in a swing state.”
Despite such warning signs about new efforts to manipulate voters, CISA officials say they do not want voters to panic or cause them to lose confidence in the election.
Ms. Easterly has urged people to expect foreign influence efforts are inevitable.
“We should expect our foreign adversaries to try and stoke discord, to try and undermine American confidence in democracy and in the integrity of election processes,” she said. “We should be prepared for it, we should expect it and we, as Americans, should not allow that. It is really up to all of us to preserve democracy.”
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.