Motives may range from a desire to influence the election outcome, to discrediting democratic processes, to creating public distrust or even political upheaval.
[4] From these efforts have come a general set of policy ideas for election security, including: The "white hat" hacker community has also been involved in the public debate.
Voting Village participants consisted of hackers, IT and security professionals, journalists, lawyers, academics, and local, state and federal government leaders.
In 2017, DHS confirmed that a U.S. foreign adversary, Russia, attempted to interfere in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election via "a multi-faceted approach intended to undermine confidence in [the American] democratic process.
"[27] This included conducting cyber espionage against political targets, launching propaganda or "information operations" (IO) campaigns on social media, and accessing elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards.
Those states included Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington, Arizona, California, Iowa, Texas, and Wisconsin.
Other actors including North Korea, Iran, organized criminals possess, and individual hackers have motives and technical capability to infiltrate or interfere with elections and democratic operations.
Many local governments use .com or other top-level domain names; an attacker could easily and quickly set up an altered copy of the site on a similar-sounding .com address using a private registrar.
A separate 2017 report from the Center for American Progress outlines nine solutions which states can implement to secure their elections,[36] including: Some have called for public testing of voter machines and mandatory post-election audits.
The Department of Homeland Security assessed “with high confidence that the penetration was carried out by Russian actors”[41] who were able to view—though not edit—voter registration records before the state shut down the VRDB for nearly two weeks.