The National Security Agency (NSA) has mobilized its “Election Security Group” that seeks to protect the coming November midterms from “foreign threats.”
The group, activated by the NSA and Cyber Command, is tasked with disrupting foreign cyberattackers aiming to hack or interfere with American elections.
A team is reportedly being assembled to combat threats coming from China, Iran, and Russia.
The group uses its foreign signals and intelligence collection capabilities to identify attackers and their intent and then fights against attackers by exposing them publicly, making their financial costs skyrocket, and by deploying other techniques.
“Thousands of people are going to work every day to defend the elections from foreign threats, from generating insights to sharing information to imposing costs by degrading and disrupting foreign adversary activity,” Election Security Group spokesperson Katrina Cheesman told The Washington Times in a statement.
The team expanded its focus to other foreign adversaries for the 2020 election and the cyber threat to elections has emerged as a persistent threat.
The team includes information specialists, planners, and operations specialists that are squarely focused on foreign threats.
Meanwhile, related domestic work is left to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
When the Election Security Group spots a cyberattack it will go on offense against the attacker, while its information provided to the domestic agencies can be used to diminish an attacker’s efforts in the U.S.
The FBI’s work with the tech sector on elections has faced mounting criticism in recent days.
As Slay News reported last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan last week that Facebook limited the reach of a negative story involving Democrat President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.
Facebook suppressed the damaging story in the run-up to the 2020 election after the FBI warned of “Russian propaganda.”
The FBI subsequently said it provides foreign threat indicators to tech companies and platforms but does not have the authority to ask or tell the companies to take any action, according to reports.
Meta later sought to downplay Zuckerberg’s comments in a statement on Twitter.
The Big Tech company said the FBI shared “general warnings about foreign interference — nothing specific about Hunter Biden.”
Republican Sens. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin wrote to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray on Tuesday requesting records about the contacts between the government and Facebook.
Facebook is not the only company that teamed with federal law enforcement and national security agencies before the 2020 election.
Tech executives from Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, Verizon, and the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, acknowledged in August 2020 that they met with the FBI, the Justice Department, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency about the coming election.
Following President Biden’s election, the federal government’s close collaboration with private tech companies has grown.
The Biden administration formed a Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative to enlist tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, to work closely with the government to fight hackers hammering critical infrastructures such as power and water systems and election security.
The NSA and Cyber Command‘s effort on election security is led by Brig. Gen. Victor Macias, deputy commander of the Cyber National Mission Force, and Anna Horrigan, NSA senior executive.
Ms. Horrigan said last week that robust relationships and intelligence exchanges across the public and private sectors are necessary for defense.
“We can’t just watch our adversaries — we have to do something about it, whether sharing timely information or taking action against that actor,” she said in a statement published by NSA.
“Our nation expects that of us.”
