Analysis | The Cybersecurity 202: Officials fear coronavirus could be next front in election interference

By Joseph Marks

11-14 minutes - Source: The Washington Post

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Medics and other health-care workers at a long-term care facility linked to two of three confirmed coronavirus cases in Washington state. (David Ryder/Reuters)

THE KEY
U.S. officials fear adversaries might weaponize public fears about coronavirus ahead of Super Tuesday to spread disinformation, amplify rumors and tamp down voter turnout. 
The concern comes as people test positive for the virus in numerous states, including California, Texas and Alabama – which are among the 14 states that will hold their Democratic primaries Tuesday. 
The virus, which has killed nearly 3,000 people worldwide, could offer a near-perfect test case for how operatives from Russia or elsewhere seeking to undermine confidence in the election could boost public fears to stop people from heading to the polls – maybe enough to swing a tight race or at least raise doubts in the results.
It's “one of a number of scenarios” of potential interference federal officials are monitoring, the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity division chief Chris Krebs told Kevin Collier at NBC News. Krebs’s office declined to comment this weekend when I asked for more information about the possible response.
“This is a new and obviously very scary virus, and misinformation can leverage off of that,” Peter Singer, a fellow at the New America think tank who has written extensively about information warfare, told me. “I would almost be surprised if we don’t see it.”
There are signs that adversaries may be trying to ramp up public anxiety, as my colleague Tony Romm reports. The propaganda-fighting wing of the State Department identified 2 million tweets peddling coronavirus conspiracy theories, including claims that it was created by the Pentagon or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Some of those tweets exhibited “evidence of inauthentic and coordinated activity,” per the report, though it didn’t say any government was behind the disinformation campaign, Tony reports.
The coronavirus is especially ripe for disinformation attacks because it’s already being treated as a partisan issue. President Trump claimed at rallies that Democrats are “politicizing” the virus and called it the left's ”new hoax." And Democrats have savaged the president for using the virus as a political football. Former vice president Joe Biden shot back that the virus is "not a Democratic hoax…this is incompetence on the part of the president of the United States at the expense of the country and the world."
This political bickering over public health could sow public distrust in government and expert statements about the virus, leading many to believe it’s either not as bad or far worse than it really is, Singer said.
“Disinformation and conspiracy theories thrive like communicable diseases,” he said. “They thrive in an environment where people don’t know basic facts or how to defend themselves.”
The fact that many Super Tuesday contests are potentially close races between Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) would make it easier for adversaries to sow doubt about a victory with minimal effort, Yonatan Striem-Amit, co-founder and chief technology officer of the cybersecurity company Cybereason, which has worked extensively on election security, told me.
“Imagine how easy it is to spread a rumor saying traces of coronavirus were found in a random sweep at a particular polling station,” he said. “Put yourself in the shoes of any voter out there and ask, ‘would that make me stay at home?’” 
An attacker could even micro-target the rumors, for example, by sending phony text messages warning about the virus to people in a particular city or neighborhood that favors one candidate, Striem-Amit and his colleague Roi Carmel, Cybereason’s chief strategy, product and marketing officer, told me.
“There should be an assumption that people will try to exploit this,” Striem-Amit said. “There should be instructions on what happens when there's a rumor, what are the official communication channels, how do you convince people, no matter what, to go out to vote.”
Coronavirus fears are not just affecting U.S. elections. In Israel, which holds its general election today, the Central Elections Committee has set up an information center to “help refute baseless rumors” about the virus and is warning voters to be wary, Aaron Rabinowitz at Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports. “We ask the public to be very alert and we understand that there may be an attempt to spread fake news about the coronavirus,” the election committee’s director, Orly Ades, told a news conference.
A Russian campaign playing on coronavirus fears targeting the U.S. would also mark a major test for social media companies, which have struggled to rein in disinformation on their platforms. Facebook, for example, has committed to removing any posts that spread misinformation about polling times and locations and to remove coronavirus conspiracy theories – but only if they’ve been debunked by health authorities.
“Such steps have won tech giants plaudits from critics who long have clamored for the industry to take a more active role in policing a wide array of harmful content on the Internet,” Tony reports. “But it has not curtailed the flood of coronavirus myths and conspiracy theories entirely: Private Facebook groups, and hard-to-find but still popular YouTube videos, continue to push inaccuracies about the malady and its origins.”

PINGED, PATCHED, PWNED

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.). (Doug Mills/New York Times/AP)

PINGED: Trump’s decision to try for a second time to install his political ally Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.) as the nation’s top spymaster promises months more disarray and confusion at the top of the intelligence community. The move comes as intelligence officials face myriad cybersecurity challenges including helping protect the 2020 election against Russian hacking and combating digital threats from Iran.
Trump backed off nominating Ratcliffe as director of national intelligence in July after the plan faced stiff resistance in Congress, as my colleagues Shane Harris and Ellen Nakashima report. But his gambit this time may not be to actually install Ratcliffe but to prolong the tenure of his acting director, another loyalist, U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell. Democrats have slammed both Ratcliffe and Grenell for lacking any background in intelligence.
“The last time this nomination was unsuccessfully put forward, serious bipartisan questions were raised about Rep. Ratcliffe’s background and qualifications,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a tweet, adding: “It’s hard for me to see how anything new has happened to change that.”
Ratcliffe has some background in cybersecurity, having led the House Homeland Security Committee’s cybersecurity panel, but has focused almost entirely on the role of cybersecurity in civilian government rather than on intelligence issues.

A sign points people toward a voting location. (Astrid Riecken for The Washington Post)

PATCHED: West Virginia, which was once a major booster of mobile voting, is backing off offering the mobile voting app Voatz as an option for voters with disabilities after an academic study revealed serious security flaws, Kevin Collier reports for NBC News.
Instead, the state will use a system that allows overseas voters to print out a ballot and mail it in, Kevin reports.
West Virginia was considering offering the app to counties to comply with a recent state law that requires an electronic voting option for all voters with disabilities. But the study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology raised too many concerns.
“If the public doesn’t want it or is skeptical to the point they’re not confident in the results, we have to take that into consideration,” Donald “Deak” Kersey, general counsel for Secretary of State Mac Warner, told Kevin.

The U.S. flag and a smartphone with the Huawei and 5G network logo. (Dado Ruvic/Reuters)

PWNED: The controversial Chinese telecom Huawei is approaching top Washington insiders who might help the company repair its reputation, the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Strumpf reports.
The company has approached at least six such figures including “Abbe Lowell, a lawyer who has represented President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Marcus Brauchli, a former executive editor of the Washington Post and former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal,” Dan reports.
U.S. officials have accused Huawei of being too close to the Chinese Communist Party and said the company can’t be trusted not to aid Chinese spying if it builds nations’ 5G wireless networks. Huawei has consistently denied those charges, however, and key U.S. allies have contracted with Huawei to build portions of their 5G networks. Some Washington insiders who talked to Huawei, “told the Journal they discussed the company’s legal and regulatory obstacles in the U.S. and how to overcome them,” Dan reports.
“Like most leading companies, Huawei sometimes relies on industry experts, consulting firms and advisory boards across the breadth of our business to ensure we’re operating in the most effective manner possible,” a Huawei spokesman told the Journal in a statement. Huawei has “no current contracts with third-party advisers outside of our usual consultants,” the official said.

CHAT ROOM

As Super Tuesday approaches, these tweets from Georgetown University Professor Matt Blaze feel especially salient:

The delicate line in election security work is conveying how utterly fragile US election infrastructure is (very, and this is an urgent problem), without feeding the "all elections are rigged" nonsense (a wild exaggeration for which there is little to no actual evidence).

— matt blaze (@mattblaze) March 1, 2020

There are real problems with election infrastructure security that urgently need to be fixed. There are actual facts to back this up, and they don't need "help."

— matt blaze (@mattblaze) March 1, 2020

PUBLIC KEY

— Cybersecurity news from the public sector:

Federal telecom enforcers told the top U.S. cellphone carriers to pay more than $200 million in penalties for allegedly mishandling sensitive location data, a punishment at least one company vowed to contest.
Wall Street Journal

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) on Friday raised concerns around the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) failure to submit a congressionally mandated election security report
The Hill

Presidential advisers want their cybersecurity “moonshot” to become more than just another report gathering dust.
Nextgov

A governmentwide federal contract vehicle joined large commercial suppliers in voicing concern over COVID-19's impact on IT supply chains.
FCW

PRIVATE KEY

— Cybersecurity news from the private sector:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) this past month disclosed a disruptive cyberattack on a U.S.
The Hill

THE NEW WILD WEST

— Cybersecurity news from abroad: