Despite escalating state-sponsored influence operations ahead of the U.S. presidential election, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly expressed confidence that none of the U.S.'s foreign adversaries, including Iran and Russia, would be able to launch intrusions that could manipulate the outcome of the upcoming polls, The Associated Press reports.
Such confidence in the resilience of the U.S.'s election infrastructure against destructive cyberattacks stems from the significant improvements that have been implemented by state and local election officials on ensuring voting and ballot counting security, noted Easterly in an interview.
"Things will go wrong. There could be another storm. There could be a ransomware attack, a distributed denial-of-service attack. These disruptions will create effects, but they will not impact the ability and the votes being cast or those votes being counted," said Easterly. Easterly's statements come after the U.S. took action against Russian state media workers involved in influence operations, as well as Iranians behind the breach of the campaign of former President Donald Trump.
