>https://bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-07-20/nsa-director-says-us-is-conducting-operations-before-elections
(excerpt from article)
There's so much more happening behind the glass.
Still, he’s worried about election security as he counts down to the November midterms.
“We are going to be full-bore against foreign interference and influence in our elections,” he says, in comments subsequently approved for release by his team.
On Tuesday, in front of a cybersecurity conference at Fordham University in New York, Nakasone wondered whether ransomware would disrupt the midterm elections, and said the US is conducting a “series of operations” now.
The backstory on US election security is instructive. The US intelligence community concluded that Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s “boldest yet” influence campaign in 2016, with Russians hacking and leaking Democratic emails and spreading disinformation on social media.
The result was the greatest expansion in US Cyber Command’s powers to date, scrapping a doctrine of restraint for a far more aggressive approach. As part of a strategy known as “persistent engagement” and “defending forward” that was inaugurated in 2018, Cyber Command started conducting operations outside US networks on a constant basis.
Nakasone has made clear he has leaned heavily into those new authorities, directing his teams to take action against foreign threats. This included operations against both Russian and Iranian threats in 2020. Cyber Command conducted more than two dozen operations to get ahead of foreign threats before they interfered with the 2020 elections, he testified last year.
This time, he’s standing up the Election Security Group, co-led by NSA and US Cyber Command.
“US Cyber Command is tasked to deny, degrade or disrupt foreign efforts to interfere in or covertly influence our elections,” he said. —Katrina Manson