Defending Election Campaigns from Cyberspace

Defending Election Campaigns from Cyberspace

Electoral candidates from both sides of the aisle increasingly rely on the internet to promote their brands and to focus the message of their political platforms. Yet cyberspace isn't safespace. How do voters know they're viewing a candidate's real website? How can voters ensure their online donations are actually going to a specific candidate or cause? Election cybercrime is a burgeoning area but little data exists on the size and scope of these unscrupulous activities. We wrote our own open source suite of tools to begin to measure the scope of this problem and used it to scan every single candidate running for the house and senate (1000+ candidates)in the 2014 General Elections. In this session we'll discuss the results of our scans and explore how any candidates and voters can defend themselves online.

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