“Cyber threats to elections can involve the creation and spread of false information and cyber attacks”
Why is it important?
In the modern world, data drives decisions. Whether this be what videos you are reccomended on YouTube, or what order to place things in a shop, data is used everywhere to maximise profits and influence decisions. Let’s take a dive into how Cybersecurity influence elections.
UK Elections
The main cyber defence against election fraud in the UK is paper. Staying away from digital voting and sticking with physical ballot papers vastly reduces the attack surface of those ballots to only physical security. These vote’s can’t be skimmed, breached or used to blackmail people engaging in the democratic process.
However, you might be giving your data away without realising it. Part of this democratic process is the electoral register, which is a list of all people registered to vote in the UK. But did you know there is also an Open Register. An opt-out service, this makes your name and address accessible to the public via the government. While this data could be used innocently, say by campaginers from political parties looking for votes, it could also be used by a malicious actor attempting to find your address for just about any reason.
Electronic Voting
In a review performed in America on their electronic voting systems, experts found “multiple severe security flaws” in some of the electronic voting systems used. While there is no evidence that these machines are yet to breached, that does not mean that they won’t in the future. Many states are hding behind this in order to justify not spending the time and money to update and secure the system. My prediction is that we will see a democratic fallout in the next few years when it is found that even one voting machine has been compromised.
As the details of these machines are not available, it is hard to guess exactly what threats they are vulnerable to, but I’d say it was a safe guess to assume that the operating systems are outdated, and the software running on these machines has not been patched. However, this is all yet to be seen.
Advertising
Advertising has always gone hand in hand with cyber, in this case I’m interested in misleading information. Take a look at this advert from a political candidate in the UK, from the current election campaign:
Image Source - The Telegraph
But wait. Look a little closer at the bottom left:
Even today, politicians will attempt to mislead people with advertising in an attempt to gain votes.
Advice and Conclusion
The main piece of advice for maintianing security around election time is be aware. Do your own research, and make sure that you are aware of how your data is being used. Thanks for reading.
“A deepfake audio clip of Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer verbally abusing party staffers and criticising Liverpool went viral in September 2023”