State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Sharing Election Threat Info with States Won't be One-Size-Fits-All, DHS Says

Nextgov: When the Homeland Security Department alerted state governments about Russian attempts to probe their election systems in 2016, it followed an ad hoc, one-size-fits-all process, mostly reaching out through existing cybersecurity relationships with governors’ offices.

As a result, the officials running those elections—which are often politically firewalled from governors—were sometimes left in the dark.

As the clock counts down to national elections in 2018 and 2020, Homeland Security is taking the opposite approach, asking top election officials in all 50 states how they’d like to communicate about relevant information security information, said Robert Kolasky, acting deputy undersecretary for Homeland Security’s cyber and infrastructure protection division.

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