Back in the 1960s, when an e-voting system was introduced, it used an optical scanner to count the votes. The latest e-voting systems have become more sophisticated and employ internet voting which allows the electors to cast their votes from anywhere using the internet. While these systems play a significant role in forming the democratic structure, they are always vulnerable to cyber-attacks. This not only makes a cyber-crime investigation a need of the hour but also indicates that a reliable cyber-crime investigation process should be in place to counter and mitigate electoral fraud.
Recently, cyber-attacks on the e-voting systems in the US elections have been a part of the debate. For instance, it was widely speculated that the 2016 US presidential elections were influenced by some cyber-related incidents. So, here we’ll discuss how cyber-attacks can influence an e-voting system and what effective strategies can be applied to mitigate these cyber threats.
Vulnerabilities in e-voting systems
Cyber-attacks may undermine the integrity of the entire electoral process by successfully exploiting the vulnerabilities of an e-voting system. The main targets of these attacks can be vote registration and counting systems, websites that publish the election results, result transmission technologies, and other online services related to the election. Stakeholders of the electoral process may also fall victim to these random attacks. Website breaches, ransomware and malware attacks, and Denial-of-Service or DoS attacks are a few examples of such cyber-attacks on e-voting systems.
While these generic attacks may not require a lot of resources and sophistication, they can simply flood the available online resources and websites to make them inaccessible.
On the other hand, more sophisticated cyber-attacks are carried out to access the internal systems, voter’s database for identity theft, and other private information. These are well-planned cyber operations controlled by a very well-funded adversary such as a nation-state. Some very advanced methods like “zero-day exploits” are used to successfully execute these attacks, causing severe damage to the whole e-voting system.
Fighting e-voting cyber-threats with Artificial Intelligence
While we have briefly reviewed some of the vulnerabilities of an e-voting system and how cyber-criminals can manipulate the election outcomes, what role can AI play to effectively mitigate these threats? Well, AI-based solutions have proven to be exceptionally useful in countering cyber-threats. Using advanced data analysis techniques, AI can detect some hidden patterns in the data and alert the organizations about a potential cyber-attack before it even happens.
AI-based cyber-security systems such as web intelligence (WEBINT) employ powerful algorithms to extract meaningful insights from the given data. They get better and better with time and continuous learning process. To put it simply, an AI system would be able to accurately detect and identify any threats from the data before any human could. It helps human resources focus more on the other important tasks.
Traditional threat hunting methods heavily rely on past outcomes and cannot learn from the new data as AI can. Furthermore, hackers employ advanced methods and tricks frequently. Therefore, only AI-driven techniques can successfully detect the amount of threats organizations face these days.
Advanced web intelligence (WEBINT) system scans through every detail to detect anomalies and unusual patterns and provides real-time information and a detailed report of the cyber incidents in the system. Plus, it may prove to be a very effective solution to secure an e-voting system.
Mitigating cyber-attacks on e-voting systems cyber-crime investigation solutions
Advanced cyber-crime investigation solutions can counter and mitigate cyber-attacks on e-voting systems. These AI crime prediction tools can easily track any cyber-related incident and extract meaningful data from unwanted cyber criminal activities. In addition, you get timely notifications of the potential threats. The system makes use of advanced AI-based algorithms to identify the unusual behavior of the cyber-criminals.
