The U.S. Presidential Election has, in many ways, been digital. Spend on digital ads in the race reached $2.9 billion in 2020. This was up sharply from $0.4 billion four years ago, marking the continuing prominence of digital political campaigning since President Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe heralded the channel as a deciding factor in the election 12 years ago.
However, an increasing challenge for this online ad spend has been ad fraud. In a new study, in association with the University of Baltimore, we see that marketers will $35 billion to digital ad fraud in 2020.
Ad fraud is the practice of fraudulently representing online advertising impressions, clicks, conversion or data events in order to generate revenue. In the case of the political campaigns, often money is spent reaching bots rather than voters.
Digital Shadows released its latest research examining foreign threats to the 2020 US presidential election. After infamously compromised elements of the 2016 Election, connected to malicious actors linked to the Russian state, Digital Shadows has uncovered further evidence related to similar efforts this year.
Any apparent election interference from countries like Iran and Russia is typically met with partisan posturing. But while politicians are busy debating which candidate might benefit, there’s a good chance that someone, somewhere, is trying the same thing again right now.
Foreign interference like the recent incident announced by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe is more common than ever because no online data is completely safe from hackers, and digital data is valuable for what it reveals.
Hall County, Ga. confirmed it experienced a network outage as a result of a ransomware attack. The cyberattack impacted critical systems within the Hall County Government networks, including phone services. While some applications are disabled as the County works to resolve this incident, business continuity measures have been implemented.
During a press conference on election security at FBI Headquarters with FBI Director Christopher Wray, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe confirmed that some voter registration information has been obtained by Iran, and separately, by Russia.
Sixty-three percent of government workers say they are worried that cyberattacks on candidates, political parties, and voting infrastructure will impact the integrity of the upcoming U.S. election, according to the Government & Election Cybersecurity Threat Index released by Morphisec, provider of Advanced Threat Prevention. In addition, more than 3-in-4 government workers (77%) believe that states and local governments need more federal funding to protect voting infrastructure better.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have released a joint cybersecurity advisory regarding advanced persistent threat (APT) actors chaining vulnerabilities — a commonly used tactic exploiting multiple vulnerabilities in the course of a single intrusion — in an attempt to compromise federal and state, local, tribal, and territorial (SLTT) government networks, critical infrastructure, and elections organizations.
According to a Mimecast report, businesses now face growing risk from phishing email attacks that prey on people’s political opinions, mirroring the COVID-19 cybercrime surge that preyed on fear.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a Public Service Announcement (PSA) to raise awareness of the potential threat posed by attempts to spread disinformation regarding the results of the 2020 elections. Foreign actors and cybercriminals could create new websites, change existing websites, and create or share corresponding social media content to spread false information in an attempt to discredit the electoral process and undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions, warns the PSA.
The Hamilton County Election Commission in Tennessee plans to utilize money from the Federal Cares Act to focus on physical security in time for the November election.
