Even though the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has bolstered its cyber security since Russian state-backed hackers infiltrated the organization in 2016, its security hygiene still doesn’t cover certain best practices, an investigation by SecurityScorecard found. The same is true for the Republican National Committee (RNC), while smaller US parties tend to be even more vulnerable to attacks than the DNC and the RNC.
The researchers also analyzed the cybersecurity posture of various political parties in European Union (EU) countries, and found that smaller parties there are also doing less to protect themselves against attacks than larger parties. This means that the risk of foreign hacking campaigns influencing the 2020 US Presidential election and the European Parliament election taking place this week, remains very real.
In fact, Jasson Casey of SecurityScorecard believes “the obvious question that comes out [of the research] is: Is it even possible for these political parties to run effective defenses?” Because “if large companies have a hard time with this, how can small political organizations do it?”
Read more: Political Parties Still Have Cybersecurity Hygiene Problems
