Feds allay election hacking fears

The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint announcement dismissing any likelihood of election hacking less than a month prior to the midterm polls, Motherboard reports. No threat actors have so far launched cyberattacks that have hindered the casting of votes, compromised ballot integrity, or impacted voter registration data accuracy, according to the FBI and CISA. "Given the extensive safeguards in place and distributed nature of election infrastructure, the FBI and CISA continue to assess that attempts to manipulate votes at scale would be difficult to conduct undetected," the agencies said. Election security experts noted that such an announcement seems to have been done to preempt the false claims of former President Donald Trump's supporters regarding vote manipulation and voting system hacking. "If we take it for what it says, it both focuses our attention on misinformation and pre-bunks more sophisticated hacking operations. And, just to be clear, that doesn't mean we can relax about these sorts of sophisticated attacks. Election officials are, to some degree, working on improving their cyber defenses," said Dan Wallach of Rice University's Department of Computer Science.