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desperate? what about this? wow.

30 Jan: Harvard: Wanted: A firewall to protect U.S. elections
Major bipartisan Harvard initiative seeks safeguards to ensure future voting integrity
By Christina Pazzanese, Harvard Staff Writer
As the FBI and Congress work to unravel Russia’s hacking of the 2016 presidential election and learn whether anyone in Donald Trump’s campaign supported the effort, one thing has become clear: U.S. elections are far more vulnerable to manipulation than was thought...

Now, as federal and state officials are partnering to examine voting and election security, a new initiative at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) is working to shore up another at-risk component of the U.S. election system: political campaigns.

Led by former presidential campaign managers for Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Mitt Romney, the Defending Digital Democracy project is gathering cybersecurity experts from the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as private-sector internet heavyweights like Facebook, Google, and the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, to identify problems and share pragmatic wisdom with local, state, and federal campaigns so they are better informed about cyber threats and can make their organizations harder for attackers to infiltrate.

“It’s really important that this is a bipartisan effort,” said Eric Rosenbach, the project’s director and a former cybersecurity leader at the Pentagon. “I don’t think that the Democrats value cybersecurity of their campaigns more than Republicans. I think Republicans are equally tuned in to the fact that it’s important because everyone recognizes that, down the road, it could impact anyone, regardless of their partisan affiliation. And so, we’re really trying to stay out of the fray.”...

“That’s what we’ve got to do in politics, and that’s why Matt and I believed it was so important to take a bipartisan approach,” said Robby Mook, who managed Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Mook will lead the project along with Matt Rhoades, who ran Romney’s 2012 presidential bid...

The idea for the project stemmed from Rosenbach’s experience as the Defense Department’s lead on cybersecurity issues during his time as chief of staff to Defense Secretary Ash Carter from 2015 to January 2017...

Mook noted that while the campaign took great care to protect against sabotage by political opponents or intruders looking for valuable information to use for espionage purposes, “I don’t think anybody was imagining that a foreign country would steal the information and then release it out to the media.”

The Russian cyberattack taught him that “it didn’t just matter how secure our campaign was, it mattered how secure the other organizations we work with are. So, the DNC, John Podesta’s personal email account — they were all good places for adversaries to find ways to hurt us. And so it really opened my eyes to how important it was to have a cybersecurity strategy that covers risk across a number of different surfaces, not just the one you directly control,” said Mook...

“One of the things that I’ve found incredibly challenging is the whole nature and structure of these campaigns,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder and chief technology officer of CrowdStrike, the firm that first identified Russian hackers as behind the DNC email server breach...
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/01/wanted-a-firewall-to-protect-u-s-elections/