Election security

Homeland Security Sees No ‘Nefarious Activity’ Threatening Cybersecurity Ahead of Midterms

It’s apparently all quiet on the election front. Bob Kolasky, a Department of Homeland Security official working on election cybersecurity issues, told The Daily Beast that DHS hasn’t seen evidence of foreign actors attempting to hack American election infrastructure ahead of the 2018 midterms.

“We have not seen anything in the 2018 election, no,” Kolasky told The Daily Beast last week in an exclusive interview. “We have not seen any significant nefarious activity.”

Preparing to counter nefarious activity has been a major project for DHS since the 2016 general election, when the Kremlin launched an information attack on the United States. The American Intelligence Community concluded in January 2017 that Russian-backed actors stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, and also launching a wide-ranging social media campaign using stolen American identities. And last September, DHS told 21 states that Kremlin-backed operatives also tried to compromise their voter databases.