Election Security Is Risky at State and Local Levels

As the 2018 midterm elections near, many remain concerned about the security of election infrastructure at the national level, though Steve Grobman, CTO at McAfee, said the realistic security risk lies in an attacker tampering with information and targeting individual counties and states. “A realistic attack wouldn’t require mass voting manipulation or the hacking of physical machines. Rather it could use misinformation campaigns focused on vulnerable gaps at the county and state levels,” Grobman wrote in an October 24 blog post. Because attackers look for the easiest point of entry that will yield the most effective results, hackers are more likely to have success by targeting specific states or congressional districts by spoofing the domains, according to Grobman. McAfee found 20 key swing states that have non-government domains, each of which could easily be spoofed to spread misinformation.