Not surprisingly, Armando Ordonez, CEO of Round Rock-based CyberDefenses, is pretty tight-lipped about what the company is seeing as it works to squash election interference.
CyberDefenses announced last month that it’s partnering with Austin cybersecurity startup SpyCloud to protect the integrity of upcoming and future elections.
“We’re not coming across things that you wouldn’t see with an attack against a consumer company,” Ordonez said in a recent interview. “But I can’t say much about (the details of) what we’ve found.”
CyberDefenses is working on behalf of one in five of the 3,000 counties running elections across the country.
It provides election security assessments that take a look at the entire cycle of an election, benchmark cyber risk and provide recommendations to plug holes that could put election offices at risk for cyberattacks and interference.
SpyCloud continuously monitors the dark web for stolen credentials across the election landscape, including election staff, county officials and third-party suppliers who could be targeted because of their access to elections, the news release said.
“SpyCloud is instrumental to the work we do in ensuring that every vote counts," Ordonez said. "It gives county governments an 'over-the-horizon view' of the cybercriminal landscape, with advanced information to protect elections from fraud and foreign interference, before it's too late."
CyberDefenses was founded in 2001 by a group who had served in the U.S. Army.
“For a long period of time, it was generally federally focused,” Ordonez said. “There was a natural progression into government work.”
The company “has been able to get in front of a number of counties across the country in multiple states. There’s definitely a lot of traction there, and we’ve been able to provide a lot of good information to the counties,” said Ordonez, who joined CyberDefenses in 2015 and took over the CEO role in 2018. “Election departments are grappling with the same cybersecurity issues that every company or federal agency faces. In the work that we’ve done so far, we are seeing similarities regardless of the industry.”
Those similarities include disinformation campaigns and ransomware attacks, he said.
Stolen credentials are still the top form of attack, the news release said. Any account associated with election operations is checked against SpyCloud's database of more than 100 billion assets compromised in data breaches. CyberDefenses alerts the county when it cannot be determined whether the user logging in is legitimate.
"SpyCloud's ability to continuously monitor suppliers as well makes their partnership essential to our mission," Ordonez said in the release. "Anyone doing business with the county needs to be secure themselves, so they are not an entry point for bad actors attempting to interfere with elections. CyberDefenses also alleviates some of the burden by defining policies that counties can extend to their supplier network; fundamentals that must be met in order to remain a partner."
CyberDefenses also uses SpyCloud's data to research the infrastructure used in election fraud campaigns.
"We are all too aware of foreign attempts to undermine the sanctity of U.S. elections, and we're proud to do our part with CyberDefenses to help stop them," Douglas Lingenfelter, director of SpyCloud's federal practice, said in the release. "Unfortunately, criminals are relentless and innovative in their attacks, so we are constantly updating our data and methods to help election officials stay ahead."
