The 2020 election in the U.S. is less than a week away and warnings about cyber threats to the vote are coming out with about the regularity as polls of the presidential contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. 

Public Sector Mega-Vendor Tyler Technologies Says It Was Hacked

On October 9, for example, the FBI and DHS warned that so called “Advanced Threat” actors were chaining together multiple vulnerabilities in an attempt to compromise federal, state and local government networks and elections organizations.

Rob Bathurst is the Chief Technology Officer at Digitalware.

Also this month, an outbreak of the Dopplepaymer ransomware affected elections infrastructure in Hall County, Georgia, disabling a database used to verify voter signatures in the authentication of absentee ballots. 

Which leads us to ask: despite years of warnings, are state and local governments ready for what Russia, Iran or any number of ransomware gangs have in store for them? 

To help answer that question, we invited Rob Bathurst into the studio. Rob is the Chief Technology Officer at Digitalware, a Denver area company that specializes in risk analysis  and risk management with Federal, state and local government and F500 companies. 

Episode 96: State Elections Officials on Front Line against Russian Hackers

In this conversation, Rob and I talk about what the biggest cyber risks are to state and local governments and how worried we should be about warnings about cyber threats to elections systems are. 

Vulnerabilities are just a reality in government networks, Rob says. The key is to avoid being surprised by attacks and also to ensure that you can keep voting systems and other critical systems available even if they are the target of an attack. 

Episode 175: Campaign Security lags. Also: securing Digital Identities in the age of the DeepFake

In this conversation, Rob  and I talk about the bigger picture of cyber risk for federal state and local governments. We also talk about incidents like the recent hack of government ERP provider Tyler Technologies. 

Rob Bathurst is the Chief Technology Officer at the firm Digitalware. he was here talking to us about cyber risks in local governments and the risk to elections systems.