A Responsibility to Support Electoral Organisations in Anticipating and Countering Cyber Threats
Cristina Frutos Lopez, Head of European Operations, Elections, Indra
The elections world is experiencing what I would call a real ‘Tsunami’ in which hybrid threats have managed to challenge the resilience of our democratic processes. From disinformation campaigns that have a direct impact on voters’ engagement, to cyber-attacks targeting vote counting and election reporting systems — these are new grounds for the electoral bodies responsible for delivering accurate and secure elections.
In this context, technology may be perceived as a vulnerability and some countries have chosen to put it aside and revert election administration to the old ‘pen and paper’ times. Last year, France dropped electronic voting for citizens abroad over fears of cyberattacks, and The Netherlands banned the count data transmission software as it presented vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers.
At Indra we believe that there are other ways to protect our electoral systems. Our customers are electoral organisations from all over the world requiring advanced technology solutions to support their elections processes — from voter registration to vote count and reporting of results. For a few years now, in addition to cyber-attacks (mainly DDoS attacks and hacking attempts to critical infrastructure), we are observing more sophisticated threats such as disinformation campaigns designed to cause voter confusion or to damage the reputation of an institution itself — a highway to undermine the entire democratic process. These campaigns have a direct link to discouraging voters from finishing their journey to the ballot box.
Indra is now investing many resources in research and development on new work streams to provide solutions to our elections customers. Our experience tells us that this new threat environment cannot be addressed from the protection perspective only. It requires a strategic approach in which monitoring and analysis of open data sources, understanding of motivations and therefore anticipating potential attacks are key to provide guidance to electoral organisations in their prevention and reaction plans. And this approach needs to be tailored on a case-by-case basis.
The design of these strategic models require a pool of expertise, technology and insightful analysis. They must be nurtured by advanced tools and combined with expertise and understanding of the elections ecosystem and communication strategies. A multi-disciplinary skills approach is difficult for electoral organisations to pull together in-house. Our responsibility as industry actors is to fill in that gap and provide the strategic vision on elections interference to support electoral organisations in the anticipation and countermeasurement of potential attacks.
We are grateful for the opportunity given to us by the European Political Strategy Centre to share our experiences. Especially now when so much is at stake.
