“When it comes to today’s election day operations, we continue to see no specific or credible threats,” a senior official from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) told reporters during a press call.
Several major social media sites were experiencing disruptions at the time of the call. But the senior official said CISA was unaware of any connection between the elections and these outages, and also unaware of any malicious cyber activity linked to the social media outages.
This presidential election cycle has brought a shift in CISA’s relationship with social media.
An ongoing court case debates how federal agencies may engage with the companies over content moderation, which impacts federal efforts to contact the companies about potential misinformation or disinformation on their platforms. A July court injunctiontemporarily prohibited certain federal agencies from communicating with social media companies about content that is protected speech. That ruling has since been modified,and the injunction is currently lifted, but the situation remains unsettled: the latest version of the case is slated for arguments this month.
The senior CISA official did not speak to that case, but said that CISA, “has not been in touch with social media companies regarding our election security mission.”
Instead, the agency has focused on helping election officials stay informed about risks and get prepared, the official said.
As CISA works to support those involved with elections, several types of threats are especially noteworthy. CISA has been particularly focused on raising awareness about the need to prepare against common cybersecurity threats like distributed denial of service attacks, as well as ransomware, the senior official said.
Generative AI is a growing concern too, and could heighten threats of misinformation and disinformation. CISA has been working to prepare election officials by providing focused trainings as well as offering an informational resource, released in January.
