CISA: U.S. election disinformation peddled at massive scale

CISA Director Jen Easterly said U.S. election systems have never been more secure during a Monday afternoon media briefing, but she warned that massive amounts disinformation are being disseminated to undermine voters' confidence in those systems.

The briefing, which TechTarget Editorial attended, was held to discuss election security prior to the U.S. Election Day on Tuesday. Hosted by Easterly and CISA Senior Advisor Cait Conley, the call covered how the cybersecurity agency was supporting state and local election officials, and presented confidence in 2024 election security.

Easterly opened her remarks by stating that the 2024 election was well underway thanks to early voting and mail-in ballots, and that over 77 million Americans had cast early ballots as of this afternoon. Noting these complexities, and given the millions more American citizens expected to vote tomorrow, Easterly affirmed her faith in the U.S. election process as well as CISA's preparedness.

"I can say with great confidence that our election infrastructure has never been more secure, and that the election community has never been better prepared to deliver safe, secure, free and fair elections," she said.

Easterly thanked state and local election officials, saying that they have been preparing for this election for years and that they are the best source of election information. She also said this is especially true as this is an election cycle with "an unprecedented amount of disinformation," including disinformation being peddled by foreign adversaries "at a greater scale than ever before."

"[These are] efforts aimed at weakening our nation, undermining our democracy and pitting Americans against one another," Easterly said. "We cannot allow our foreign adversaries to have a vote in our democracy."

Earlier this year, Iranian nation-state threat actors breached the campaign of former President Donald Trump and exfiltrated confidential data, which the hackers then leaked to media outlets. More recently, Russian advanced persistent threat groups used fake videos and generative AI to drive disinformation campaigns against Vice President Kamala Harris.

2024 is a major election year, with approximately half the world's population expected to participate in national elections of some kind. During a keynote at Black Hat USA 2024 in August, Easterly similarly affirmed that U.S. election infrastructure "has never been more secure." And in May, former CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales told TechTarget Editorial that election security preparations were already well underway. He noted that CISA had done "several hundred" physical security assessments of election offices and polling locations over the previous year.

CISA is entering a complicated election week in its own right. Four years ago, then-President Trump fired Chris Krebs -- Easterly's predecessor -- for challenging Trump's unfounded claims regarding widespread voter fraud. During today's briefing, PBS NewsHour correspondent Nick Schifrin asked Easterly about the firing and whether CISA would make any statement regarding the security of the election after the fact, like Krebs had.

Easterly responded in the affirmative, saying that she plans to make a statement as she did in 2022 regarding "whether we have seen any evidence of malicious factors changing, altering or deleting any votes that had any sort of an outcome on the presidential election."

As for what the agency has seen so far, the CISA director pointed to "small-scale incidents resulting in no significant impacts to election infrastructure," such as low-level DDoS attacks, criminal destruction of ballots and drop boxes, severe weather in parts of the U.S., and threats against election officials. Easterly said the agency anticipates that these and other types of disruptions will continue on Election Day and in the days to follow.

Threats against election officials have become a growing concern for state and federal agencies since the 2020 election. Conley, speaking on behalf of CISA, censured this behavior in the strongest language possible. "As a nation, this is something that we should absolutely condemn and disavow, and is fundamentally un-American," she said. "And we thank all of the election workers and election officials out there for the tremendous service they are doing to our democratic process."

Alexander Culafi is a senior information security news writer and podcast host for TechTarget Editorial.