An Alexandria-based cybersecurity agency has broken down how the 2020 Presidential election could be hacked in a report distributed to the National Association of Secretaries of State. While Louisiana appears to be secure, Ingalls Information Security CEO Jason Ingalls says in a recent intrusion response, the agency discovered vulnerabilities to ransomware.
“It is possible that the attackers could attack state agencies around the time of an election to use the election as kind of a forcing mechanism and say, ‘Look, you are in the middle of an election, maybe you should pay your ransom,'” said Ingalls.
Ingalls says local level election systems are a likely target.
“They certainly don’t have a budget to add advanced cybersecurity controls tat the local election authority level, and so they are vulnerable to these advanced malware attacks,” said Ingalls.
State agencies such as the OMV were recently impacted by a ransomware attack. But Ingalls says the state’s election systems are a testament to good security.
“The Secretary of State’s office and all of the local election authorities are protected under a different method, so they weren’t impacted by that attack. When we saw what happened, we saw what could have happened had the right controls not been in place,” said Ingalls.
