News: Election officials call for calm

Monday, July 15, 2024

Election officials call for calm

Jul 15, 2024

With help from Joseph Gedeon and Maggie Miller

Driving the Day

— The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has set the country on edge — and election officials from both parties were some of the most prominent voices trying to lower the temperature.

HELLO, and welcome to MORNING CYBERSECURITY! We will all remember where we were on Saturday.

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Today's Agenda

The Republican National Convention kicks off in Milwaukee. Starts at 8 a.m.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies holds a virtual discussion on AI transformation at the Pentagon. 1:30 p.m.

Election Security

A(NOTHER) WAKE UP CALL — America’s state and local election workers know as well as anyone the costs of politically charged violence.

That might be why many of them were among the first — and most credible — voices to step into the breach following the attack on Donald Trump on Saturday.

— State officials speak up: “I condemn political violence in the most unequivocal terms. NO American political figure should ever be threatened with OR acted against with violence,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, posted on X Saturday night only minutes after the shooting was first reported.

“There is zero space for political violence — as Americans we unite together and handle our disputes peacefully at the ballot box,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told MC in a text. Raffensperger, who said he and his wife Tricia are praying for Trump’s swift recovery, posted a similar message on X within an hour of the shooting.

— Place of experience: State, local and federal election officials across the U.S. faced harassment and death threats for months after the 2020 election, when Trump and his allies sought to overturn Joe Biden’s win.

Fontes, Raffensperger and top election officials in other swing states, who also quickly condemned the violence against Trump, bore the brunt of many of those post-election attacks — but expressed hope, not bitterness, that the country could draw the right lessons from Saturday.

“May this disturbing incident provide a turning point – away from hateful rhetoric and threats and towards civility for all,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, shared on X.

— Not just cyber: Still, the attack on Trump is a harrowing reminder of how bitterly divided American politics has become since 2016 — and how that is changing elections administration.

Chris Harvey, a former senior elections official in Georgia and now the deputy director of the nonprofit Committee for a Safe and Secure Elections, said many local officials have refocused their energies from cyber to physical security since 2020.

Whereas elections were all “cyber, cyber, cyber” after 2016, many officials are now touting things like the installation of bulletproof glass, said Harvey. “That is not something that formerly had been a feature in elections offices.”

— This ain’t easy: Kim Wyman, a Republican and Washington state’s former top election official in 2020, echoed Harvey in describing how much officials have pivoted from thinking about keeping out hackers to stopping “angry mobs around election offices.”

But she argued the events this weekend show how critical it is for political leaders to be more mindful of whipping up their voters with dire rhetoric about Election Day. “I hope that Saturday is making people stop and pause and think about all the vitriol in campaigns,” she said.

Cyber Workforce

FIRST IN MC: INTO THE WEEDS ON THE WORKFORCE — The Biden administration is racing to fill the United States’s immense cyber workforce gap — but it’s still got a long way to go, my colleague Joseph Gedeon writes in a new Pro Brief out this morning.

The country faces a shortfall of roughly a half-million security professionals. That’s actually a notable decrease from the shortfall of 700,000 the White House said existed two years ago, before the Office of the National Cyber Director rolled out a new cyber workforce strategy and moved to ease hiring requirements for federal IT positions, among other moves detailed by Joseph.

— The good: Just last week, the Office of Management and Budget sent a memo to federal agencies instructing them to illustrate how they plan to invest in the efforts to expand their security workforces, including by ditching four-year college degree criteria for security pros.

And as Joseph points out, the administration has slashed the average wait time for security clearances — a common barrier for federal employment — while nudging U.S. universities to expand their security curricula and notching new pledges and investments from the private sector.

— The daunting: The country is still fighting an uphill battle to close the security gap, at a time when cybersecurity threats from Russia, China and Iran are ratcheting up.

“The workforce, that’s going to be a continuous focal point for us for quite some time,” National Cyber Director Harry Coker said at a media roundtable in May. “There is no downtime in cybersecurity.”

The International Scene

FIRST IN MC: IRANIAN SLEUTHS GET BUSY — Cyber operators associated with Iran’s state intelligence services have significantly amped up their hacking activity against Israel and a smattering of other nations since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, according to new research from Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point.

The MuddyWater hacking group, believed to support Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, is using phishing emails sent from compromised accounts, legitimate remote management tools and a new, bespoke backdoor to target organizations in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, India and Portugal, Check Point says.

Overall, the firm finds that Muddy Water “has significantly increased its activities” since last October, with the notable proportion of those campaigns focused on penetrating Israeli municipalities.

— Open question: Check Point does not indicate whether it has any evidence the hackers are after anything other than espionage. But it does call the development of the backdoor “a notable development” that illustrates the “persistent nature” of the group.

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Tweet of the Weekend

Something to watch for cyber wonks:

@kevincollier/X

Quick Bytes

False and unsubstantiated claims flooded social media after the Trump assassination attempt, as The New York Times, POLITICO and NBC News reported.

Republicans are setting the stage for an unprecedented raft of legal challenges to the vote this November should Trump lose, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported over the weekend.

AT&T appears to have paid hackers $400,000 to delete sensitive phone records stolen in a massive breach, Bloomberg reports.

Chat soon.

Stay in touch with the whole team: Joseph Gedeon (jgedeon@politico.com); John Sakellariadis (jsakellariadis@politico.com); Maggie Miller (mmiller@politico.com); and Heidi Vogt (hvogt@politico.com).