Most US Presidential Campaign Websites Offer Little Privacy Protection

By Jai Vijayan for Dark Reading
Tuesday, October 8, 2019

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Most presidential campaigns scored relatively well on the website security front, likely because they were built on new, recently secured platforms, OTA said. All of the websites, for instance, used trusted SSL/TLS certificates, and 53% used TLS 1.3, the latest encryption protocol. Fifty-eight percent of the websites used a web application firewall to protect against online threats. The OTA audit did not detect malware on any of the sites.

Those findings are going to be of some relief for those concerned about campaign sites being abused. Sloppily protected sites can cause all sorts of problems for candidates and voters, says Ilia Kolochenko, CEO of ImmuniWeb, a web security company whose tool was used in the OTA research.

"It all depends on the intent of attackers and their eventual goals," Kolochenko says. Scammers can start a fake fund collection campaign to steal money from a candidate by hosting a hidden section on the website with their own bank account. Or a nation-state attacker could breach a candidate's website and use it to spread fake news.

Such scenarios may cause considerable damage to democratic processes, Kolochenko notes. "The risks for website users go from theft of their data stored on the website to being infected with drive-by-download malware."

All but two of the campaigns also had email authentication mechanisms in place to protect users against phishing attempts. Eighty-seven percent of the websites used both the Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) protocols, allowing email recipients to verify the identity of the sender. Sixty-one percent used Domain-Based Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) for identifying forged and spoofed emails.

Rudis says the comprehensive use of TLS/SSL configurations across all presidential campaign sites and the above-average use of email safety protocols such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is very encouraging. "However, given the myriad hacking issues during the previous major campaign cycle, the fact that only 30% of campaigns made it to the honor roll is a pretty damning statistic," he says.

Digital interaction is the primary method of communication between campaigns and citizens, he notes. "In 2019, there is no excuse for not ticking all the boxes that ensure the security, safety, and privacy in each interaction and for each data element captured." Read Full Article