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Feds in various agencies monitor, safeguard election in #Protect2020

Some UB students and grads become cyber warriors in federal program.

BUFFALO, N.Y. — It's officially designated as #Protect2020. That's not the year which has been a COVID compromised mess for most people. But it's for this election and the crucial process of making sure those millions of votes are tabulated correctly as all of us making our choices intend them to be. 

The state and local county election boards are in charge of security for their specific computer systems, but there's been plenty of federal oversight with this election.

"As of even last fall we were meeting with election commissioners from across the 17 counties in Western New York," said Maureen Dempsey, a spokesperson for the FBI Buffalo Office. "We sat down in the same room with some of their IT folks. Just to have a conversation — you know — what are they seeing in terms of any kind of activity on their systems. Because again we prepared months and months ago — knowing what happened in 2016 that we wanted to be prepared. That's where there's some concern. You know the intrusions —  not knowing if there's a nation or a criminal entity lying in wait in that system before the election... who is gonna come out and maybe take over a website or even the infrastructure."

Democratic Erie County Elections Commissioner Jeremy Zellner pointed out, "We participate in security events across the state — when we have our commissioners conference, we met with the FBI. Our county is in a strong position for security, for cybersecurity. Some counties are not."

In fact Chenango County near Binghamton in the Southern Tier was hacked back on October 18 with a criminal ransomware attack on over 200 county computers. County IT staffers flushed the malware, installed new software, and they stress vote counting will not be affected. They maintain it was not specifically targeting the election system, but it does prove some vulnerability.

Back in Erie County Zellner stresses, "On Election Day our machines are not linked up. Our machines just collect the data from what we put in them. So they're not like uploaded or uplinked to anything." 

2 On Your Side's Ron Plants asked Zellner if there was a paper backup, to which Zellner responded, "Oh for everything. I would never want to do an election that is just totally online or totally digital or just push button. It just doesn't work."

But elsewhere around the country there are digital concerns where hackers already got in to election systems. That's where other federal agencies come in as well. 

Cyber Command in the Defense Department is just part of a federal network of agencies guarding our nation's computer systems and now the election system from foreign hackers, threats and disinformation campaigns. 

And now a new player is taking part in what's designated as Protect 2020. CISA is the Cyber Infrastructure Security agency organized in 2018 and staffed by cyber warriors in DC and elsewhere.

They work hand in hand with the FBI according to Dempsey. 

"We have partnered with CISA and the NSA (National Security Agency) because it's a really, really important time for the public to realize that there are attempts by foreign nations to try to influence this election," Dempsey said. "And the only way to be able to kind of combat that is to join together with all these entities."

In fact NBC News reports intrusion detection devices installed in every state's elections computer systems, even as late as last Friday, turned up evidence that hackers in Iran had accessed voter registration data in some unspecified states. 

Dempsey says, "There's nothing more important to other nations than maybe interfering with our ability to have a free election."

As it turns out, students in UB's Computer Science program based at Davis Hall on UB's North Campus in Amherst have been involved in those federal government programs to safeguard this country's computer infrastructure including election security.

Some of the UB students have specifically interned with the CISA cyber agency as well as the FBI and other agencies that protect our nation's infrastructure like power grids. Some UB graduates also now work for those agencies. The university has received federal grants to be part of a cyber warrior ROTC program if you will. 

"Actually that's a huge area that we recruit in," Dempsey said. "Agents that work cybercrimes everyday all day. They get involved on the national security side of the house against foreign nations who are hacking into our systems."

And so far it's apparently working, but they'll be on guard according to Dempsey. 

"We don't have that concern that there's any type of cyber activity that's going to alter the accurate vote count — that's not a concern right now, but certainly something that we need to consider," Dempsey said. "We've been able to prevent that up to this point."

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