SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – The top U.S. cybersecurity agency said it plans to monitor and issue security alerts on the congressional election on Tuesday, amid worries about potential efforts to interfere with the vote.
Election security has emerged as a key issue in the United States after officials found Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election with a campaign of hacking and propaganda intended to hurt Hilary Clinton’s chances of winning against Donald Trump.
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) plans to set up an “Elections Day Operations Center” with public and private sector partners across the country to monitor the midterms, it said in a statement on Monday.
“In recent years, election officials have had to contend with increasing disinformation from foreign adversaries, which can cause confusion about election infrastructure and undermine voters’ faith in the process,” Kim Wyman, CISA’s senior election security advisor, said in a statement last week.
“Now, when something goes wrong – and with 8,800 election jurisdictions across the country, something will go wrong somewhere – the innocuous can be made to look nefarious.”
(Reporting by Zeba Siddiqui in San Francisco; Editing by Tom Hogue)
