Microsoft Aims to Help Election Officials Boost Security
The AccountGuard service, which Microsoft is offering for free to customers in the political sector, “notifies organizations of cyberattacks, tracking threat activity across email systems run by organizations as well as the personal accounts of its employees who opt-in,” Neutze writes.
The service provides notification in the event “of a verifiable threat or compromise by a known nation-state actor against the participant’s Office 365 account,” including “notification to both the organization and, where possible, the impacted individual if a registered Hotmail.com or Outlook.com account associated with the organization is verifiably threatened or compromised by a known nation-state actor.”
The service also offers recommendations to the participating organization for remediation if a compromise is confirmed.
“Democracies were already facing adversaries intent on using cyberattacks to disrupt our elections and democratic processes,” Neutze writes. “Now, as the world battles the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen, and others have reported, that nation states and cybercriminals are taking advantage of the crisis by using virus-themed phishing attacks and other techniques to attack critical institutions. We must assume they will use these techniques to target our elections as well.”
Meanwhile, the Election Security Advisors service gives campaign and election officials the ability to choose from two offerings from Microsoft’s Detection and Response Team. The first is an assessment of an organization’s systems and expert help in configuration to close any security gaps, according to Neutze. The second is an incident response service that enables organizations to find the cause of a cyberattack and root it out, and offers the direction required to restore their systems, Neutze says.