Officials steel for digital mayhem as November looms: ‘Can guarantee that things will go wrong’

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A leading U.S. cybersecurity official is warning about digital disruptions surrounding the November elections but said government officials are prepared to meet the challenge.

Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, predicted that such looming trouble would become routine, like bad weather on Election Day.

Election officials are on high alert. Microsoft said Friday that it had uncovered efforts by Iranian government-linked groups to meddle in the elections.

Ms. Easterly told the Black Hat USA 2024 hacker conference in Las Vegas last week that “election infrastructure has never been more secure, and the election stakeholder community has never been stronger.”

Still, she said, headaches are bound to happen.

“I can guarantee that things will go wrong,” Ms. Easterly said. “A poll worker will forget their key to the polling location. Somebody will pull out the plug on the printer so they can plug in their hot pot to make lunch. There will be a storm, there will be a distributed denial-of-service attack, there could be a ransomware attack.”

Last month, the CISA and the FBI issued a public warning about the prospect of distributed denial-of-service attacks on infrastructure and websites tied to the election. The service denial attacks overwhelm vulnerable systems with traffic, prompting webpages to crash. The agencies indicated that unofficial vote tallies may be in the cyberattackers’ crosshairs.

In a briefing with reporters last month, the U.S. intelligence community revealed that it had observed foreign efforts scanning election infrastructure, although the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to give details about the foreign surveillance.

Ms. Easterly said potential turmoil could be disruptive but would not affect election integrity.

“Election officials are natural-born crisis managers,” she said at the Black Hat conference. “They have been doing this, they’ve been preparing for it for a long time. They know how to deal with these types of disruptions, and they’ve been practicing it, preparing for it, and they will be able to respond to it.”

The intelligence community is closely watching activity from Russia, China and Iran and has identified Tehran, in particular, as a likely “chaos agent” during the elections.

Microsoft said Friday that it had detected Iranian government-connected groups laying the groundwork for influence campaigns on trending election topics to influence U.S. voters, especially in critical swing states.

The tech giant said it assessed that the groups had launched operations designed to collect intelligence on political campaigns.

Microsoft said one group launched “covert news sites” targeting voters on opposite ends of the political spectrum. One suspect website hurled insults at former President Donald Trump, and another claimed to be a source for political conservatives with a focus on gender and sexuality.

A second Iranian group has been preparing to take more dramatic measures in the U.S. since March, according to Microsoft.

“We believe this group may be setting itself up for activities that are even more extreme, including intimidation or inciting violence against political figures or groups, with the ultimate goals of inciting chaos, undermining authorities, and sowing doubt about election integrity,” Microsoft said on its blog.

A third Iranian group sent a spear-phishing email to a “high-ranking official on a presidential campaign” from the compromised account of a former senior adviser. The group also sought to log into “an account belonging to a former presidential candidate.”

Microsoft said a fourth Iranian group was trying to breach the account of a “county-level government employee in a swing state.”

Despite such warning signs about efforts to manipulate voters, CISA officials say they do not want voters to panic or lose confidence in the election.

Ms. Easterly has urged people to expect foreign influence efforts to be inevitable.

“We should expect our foreign adversaries to try and stoke discord, to try and undermine American confidence in democracy and in the integrity of election processes,” she said. “We should be prepared for it, we should expect it and we, as Americans, should not allow that. It is really up to all of us to preserve democracy.”