SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Venafi®, the leading provider of machine identity protection, today announced the results of a study on the security of election infrastructure in Germany. The study included responses from 305 German security professionals who are responsible for encryption in their own organizations.
According to the study, 86 percent of security professionals are concerned about cyber attacks targeting election data or infrastructure. In addition, 84 percent believe cyber criminals are likely to target election data as it is transmitted from local polling stations to central aggregation points.
“German security professionals uniquely understand the risks to free and accurate elections,” said Kevin Bocek, chief cyber security strategist for Venafi. “Last year, it was shown that German election infrastructure software could be easily hacked – leading to the possibility of tampered tabulation and transmission of results. Adversaries want to raise doubts about our democracies, thus they are concentrating on voting tabulations to raise doubts about our elections.”
Additional findings from the study include:
- Ninety-four percent believe election systems, including voting machines, software and back-end systems, should be considered critical infrastructure.
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When asked which parts of their election infrastructure are most
vulnerable to cyber attackers:
- Sixty-one percent say voting machines that collect election data.
- Sixty percent say back-end systems that aggregate election data.
- Forty-one percent say communications between back-end election systems.
- Fifty-seven percent believe the potential damage from cyber attacks targeting election systems is more serious than the potential damage from election tampering efforts that target social media.
Bocek concludes: “It’s no surprise to see nearly all German security professionals agree that voting infrastructure is under attack. Ultimately, the back-end systems that transmit, aggregate, tabulate, validate and store election data are as vulnerable to cyber attacks as voting machines.”
Additional Resources:
Results: Venafi German Security Survey – Election Protection
Blog: Venafi Research: Is German Election Infrastructure Safe From Cyber Attackers?
About Venafi
Venafi is the cybersecurity market leader in machine identity protection, securing connections and communications between machines. Venafi protects machine identity types by orchestrating cryptographic keys and digital certificates for SSL/TLS, IoT, mobile and SSH. Venafi provides global visibility of machine identities and the risks associated with them for the extended enterprise—on premises, mobile, virtual, cloud and IoT—at machine speed and scale. Venafi puts this intelligence into action with automated remediation that reduces the security and availability risks connected with weak or compromised machine identities while safeguarding the flow of information to trusted machines and preventing communication with machines that are not trusted.
With over 30 patents, Venafi delivers innovative solutions for the world's most demanding, security-conscious Global 5000 organizations, including the top five U.S. health insurers; the top five U.S. airlines; four of the top five U.S., U.K., Australian and South African banks; and four of the top five U.S. retailers. For more information, visit: http://venafi.com.
