Whatever your preference of candidates might have been, one thing was clear from the 2016 U.S. presidential election: the Russian government targeted American political organizations of both parties with an aggressive wave of cyber intrusions. Both private sector analysts and the U.S. Intelligence Community agree on this point.
Furthermore, FBI Director James Comey recently told a congressional committee that “they’ll be back in 2020…they may be back in 2018.” The head of the NSA, Admiral Mike Rogers, concurred, saying that he “fully expect[s] they will maintain this level of activity.” As we head into the 2018 mid-term election season and beyond, candidates, campaign staff, and political consultants all clearly need to harden their systems against attackers. As a nation, we need to act now to protect our democratic process against foreign meddling; and here is how we can do just that.
Faced with a potential onslaught from persistent and technically advanced adversaries, secure, easy to use end-to-end encrypted email and file-sharing, with no need for “super users” or passwords, could have saved political organizations a massive series of headaches during the previous election cycle.