U.S. Fires Up ‘All Government’ War on Cyber Election Threats

Haunted by Russia’s brazen effort to meddle in the last election, federal and state officials have erected what they believe are formidable barriers to thwart cyber-attacks ahead of Tuesday’s presidential vote.

Cybersecurity experts, including those authorized to deploy military cyber capabilities, have been brought together to form an ‘all of government’ effort to ensure voters decide whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins, without U.S. adversaries sabotaging the process. That means dozens of state, local, federal and private players, amounting to hundreds of people, will be linked to the Department of Homeland Security’s command center on election night.

The effort will be led by the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, and will include representation from U.S. Cyber Command, the State Department, the National Security Agency, the FBI and the likes of Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc., as well as states, counties and private sector cyber surveillance teams.

That’s not all. Congress has distributed nearly a billion dollars to states to protect voting systems and procure paper trails -- that can be audited -- for each vote. And both non-profit and private sector companies have shared subsidized malware detection systems to watch for intruders seeking to topple voting systems or provoke chaos on and after Election Day.