Editorials: Election hacking: is it the end of democracy as we know it? | Nick Ismail/Information Age
Since the 2016 US election, there have been murmurs about hacking elections. There are reports of hacktivists trying to compromise the ballot and rogue governments trying to control the outcome. But in a post-truth world, how much of this is legitimate? How much can we brush aside as fake news? If the recent controversial Iowa caucuses are anything to go by, we are definitely at risk. Sometimes bad actors also hack other criminals to use their network and hide their true identity. Recently, this was the case when a group of hackers from Eastern Europe compromised the network of elite Iranian hackers. In this scenario, governments and private companies in the Middle East and Britain were attacked while Tehran was set up to take the blame. So it begs the question, in the current threat landscape, what does it mean to hack an election?