dan centinello: are you afraid of election-day cyber attacks?
TRANSCRIPT
When the hacker known only asGuccifer 2.0 released a wealth ofconfidential documents includinginternal emails originating frommembers of the Democratic Party,it opened the door for Donald
Trump and the Republican partyto point out potential corruption in
the party.
But it also raised the eyebrows of Americans everywhere,
who began to question not only the Democratic Party’s
ethics, but the overall security of the election systems and
voting machines. If a hacker like Guccifer 2.0 is able to so
easily crack open the trove of email chains and documents
that were supposedly securely exchanged by the
Democratic party, what’s to prevent the possibility of cyber
attacks on or around election day that could potentially
change the outcome of the election as a whole?
These fears have been addressed byboth politicians and high-levelmembers of national security. Afterthe breach at the Democratic NationalConvention, CIA Director JohnBrennan stated, "if there has beensome manipulation of the electionprocess here, this is going to besomething that this government andour country is going to have to lookat.” While Brennan and CIA haveundoubtedly spent time investigatingthe hacks and searching for potentialfraud, relatively little has come of theinvestigations thus far.
Electronic voting systems, one of the primarypotential points of entry for hackers looking todisrupt the election, seem to be vulnerable. Thepossibility remains that hackers could, in theory,hack into these machines–some of them about 10years old and reportedly lacking up-to-date security
features–and manipulate vote counts.
Large-scale manipulation, however, appearsunlikely. To have a tangible impact on the
election–that is, manipulating enough votes to causethe electoral college to shift from one candidate tothe other–would require an immense number of
entries into local computerized machines. The morelikely scenario appears to be the possibility ofhacking wireless machines or larger-scale
documentation and international communicationleaks.
Despite the fact that Russian–or domestic,for that matter–cyber attacks are veryunlikely to change the outcome of theNovember election, many are calling forupgraded and updated measures to ensurethe safety and security of their vote comeNovember 8.