The Democrats’ top cybersecurity boss said he cannot guarantee the midterm elections earlier this week were hack-free. “Good news is we didn’t hear very much on that day,” said Raffi Krikorian, the chief technology officer of the Democratic National Committee, on Thursday. “But remember, any sophisticated attack is not something we’re going to detect today. It’s something we’re going to detect a few days from now, or a few weeks … or a few months from now, as we go through our logs and try to understand what really happened.” Krikorian made his first public remarks since the US midterms at the annual Web Summit tech event in Lisbon, Portugal. Krikorian leads a team of 35 technology and security specialists tasked with protecting the Democrats and the party’s tech infrastructure. He was previously a top executive at Uber and pioneered self-driving technology at the ride-sharing company. Prior to Uber, he worked as a top engineering executive at Twitter (TWTR).
“As far as we can tell, no one had a [cybersecurity] incident. But remember, we’re also dealing with an infrastructure that’s super rickety. We’re dealing with foreign interference of well-funded actors that we’ll probably never detect. So this is a very complicated landscape,” he said.
“We’re about to start on a whole set of post-mortems, effectively, on just what happened on the days, weeks leading up to election day so we can really understand [if there was a security breach].”
Democrats won a majority in the US House of Representatives on Tuesday while the Republicans increased their majority in the Senate.
The Democrats were especially vigilant about cybersecurity during these midterms following high-profile hacking incidents and disinformation campaigns in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.
Full Article: Democrats tech boss can’t guarantee midterms were hack-free.