QUESTION
What measures are in place to safeguard the NYC Board of Elections from cyber threats?
3:54:01
·
4 min
The NYC Board of Elections has implemented various measures to protect against cyber threats.
- Cybersecurity issues have been treated as emergencies since 2016, with tabletop exercises conducted regularly.
- Monitoring services are in place 24/7 to detect and respond to external threats.
- The voter registration system is kept in-house and inaccessible externally, even during remote work periods.
- Collaborations with federal, state, and local partners enhance the cybersecurity efforts.
David M. Carr
3:54:01
I wanted to talk a little bit about cybersecurity.
3:54:04
Read about this a lot.
3:54:05
Voters are understandably concerned that in this day and age, whether their information of course, their elections are safe from cyberattack.
3:54:14
And I was wondering if you guys could tell us a little bit about what you've been doing internally to the BOE to safeguard the vote from those kinds of threats.
Michael J.Ryan
3:54:22
So I I can go back to 2016.
3:54:26
I I don't wanna say that cybersecurity wasn't an issue before 2016, but it certainly bubbled very quickly to the surface in the summer of 2016.
3:54:37
And one of the things that we started doing then, which, you know, my mom used to say, don't break your own pet yourself on the back, but it really was.
3:54:46
It might suggest an insistent an insistence.
3:54:48
We started to treat cybersecurity issues.
3:54:51
The same way that you would treat any other emergency like an impending or potential hurricane or any other kind of mass electric outage.
3:55:01
And I asked then directed Jeff Brown, who's now departed.
3:55:07
The agency has become NYC 3.
3:55:09
To start to do tabletop exercises, where we treat cybersecurity issues the same way that you would treat any other emergency.
3:55:17
And it has dropped off a little bit in in in COVID.
3:55:23
He's come back again this year, you know, with with a lot of further, we get everybody in the room.
3:55:31
And when I'm talking to everybody, federal, state, local officials, security experts, police department, cyber people, FBI, department of homeland security.
3:55:44
And others.
3:55:45
And and basically the idea behind it is to put a face and a name together so that if there's an emergency that I'm not calling this guy, Dave.
3:55:54
Right?
3:55:54
I'm calling David Michael Carr that I know from being at the table and and working together.
3:56:00
That having been said, we have a very close relationship on an ongoing basis with NYC 3.
3:56:08
We don't like to particularly discuss the efforts that are made in this area publicly because we don't want to invite, you know, mischief.
3:56:19
But we do have monitoring services that were provided through contracts from NYC3.
3:56:26
We used to be do it.
3:56:27
That monitor our systems 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
3:56:36
And and they they monitor our systems to make sure that if there's any external threats.
3:56:43
Either potential threats or actual threats.
3:56:47
Fortunately, we haven't seen them from time to time, but I can tell you of an instance, and I won't say who it was.
3:56:54
Was a an elected official launched Staten Island whose campaign website was was hacked.
3:57:01
From external mischief, and it was advised by the board of elections, advised the official that their website was was in a little bit of a a problem because of the way that the traffic was coming into us.
3:57:15
We noticed something wasn't right, and we made the appropriate referral.
3:57:21
So it's not only protecting us in our systems.
3:57:25
For example, the voter registration system.
3:57:29
We have kept that as a fully in house system not subject to external access.
3:57:38
To the extent that during the COVID emergency when we had a lot of people working from home.
3:57:42
The one system that they were not allowed to access was the voter registration system.
3:57:47
You couldn't go on to a VPN and get into the voter registration system because we're not confident that it's impervious if we open the door.
3:57:57
So we keep that door shut.
3:57:59
I don't know, Mister Ignizio, if you have anything else you'd like
Lincoln Restler
3:58:02
to add
Michael J.Ryan
3:58:02
to that.
Vincent Ignizio
3:58:03
We we work with federal, state, and city partners throughout to put a robust safety net approach.
3:58:08
Of course, nothing is invulnerable, but we are working every day, and we get alerts and concerns every day about potential threats and when when we react, and we really rely heavily on our federal state and city partners who do this day in and day out and the the system is of the utmost concern to us, particularly in years that have the nation's more you know, the nation's concerns such as a presidential year.
David M. Carr
3:58:33
Appreciate that answer.
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