Tuesday, October 18th 2022
Senior Fellow and Director of the Election Cybersecurity Initiative Adam Clayton Powell was featured in a CSO report on Election security and misinformation threats that loom large ahead of the US midterms. The featured portion of his interview is below:
Adam Clayton Powell III, executive director of the Election Cybersecurity Initiative at the USC Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy, tells CSO the PSA on election security strikes an appropriate tone even if “the Russians keep trying the doorknobs. It’s not as if somehow this threat has gone away; it’s just that we are in a better position to defend election systems and campaigns than in the past.”
Powell thinks one threat hasn’t received enough attention: potential foreign threat actor attacks on the media. Gary Pruitt, the former CEO of Associated Press, said that during the 2020 election, his news organization was subjected to thousands of cyberattacks from Russia leading up to election night. During one of the workshops Powell’s group runs for election officials and campaign workers, Powell asked Pruitt to explain what would’ve happened if Russia had succeeded in one of those attacks. “He said, ‘Oh, it’s very simple. We would’ve had no election returns that night,’” Powell says.
Powell agrees with the greater emphasis CISA and the FBI have placed on the dangers of misinformation. “It’s much more cost-effective for bad actors, foreign and domestic, to use disinformation and misinformation to cast out on democracy itself, on the election itself, and the election outcome,” he says. “That doesn’t cost a lot.”
Read the full report at: https://www.csoonline.com/article/3676695/election-security-misinformation-threats-loom-large-ahead-of-the-us-mid-terms.html