ZeroFOX Seeks to Protect Election Campaigns
Online election interference has become such a concern that one company has now launched a product to help protect against it. ZeroFOX has announced a security suite to safeguard political candidates and campaigns from online threats.
The ZeroFOX Election Protection Solution analyzes data across social media and other online sources, including the deep web (the closed surface websites that aren’t publicly searchable) and the dark web (usually .onion sites accessed via Tor). It searches for fake accounts, phishing attacks and threats of physical harm, along with malware links and malicious domains and websites.
ZeroFOX has a situational awareness team that helps to address fake or online content and take it down from campaign-owned digital platforms in real time. It will also work with social media networks to remove content that violates the networks’ terms of service (ToS), says ZeroFOX CTO Mike Price.
“ZeroFOX bridges customers to the social networks, requesting that ToS-violating content be taken down where appropriate,” he says. “The social networks are the entities that ultimately decide how to respond to any given piece of content. If they agree that a piece of content violates ToS and should be taken down, then it is generally quickly taken down. ”
Users of the product first determine which candidates and website to protect, and then configure rules from a library of pre-built policies to watch for spoof accounts, takeovers and inappropriate content, including online threats.
ZeroFOX also claims to be the first offering a deepfake detection solution as part of the product. That technology, announced at the Black Hat conference last week, uses artificial intelligence to look for fake videos. The company also donated its AI deepfake detection toolkit, Deepstar, to the open source community to help others train AI data sets that can help spot fake videos.
Election interference using digital platforms continues to be a concern in various regions. Last month, a Senate Intelligence Committee report found that Russia had probably infiltrated voting infrastructures in all 50 states over the last few years. Another report found San Mateo County’s election systems vulnerable to hijacking and propagating disinformation. In May, a report from SecurityScorecard found political parties in several countries badly failing at protecting their election systems.
In Europe, the EU issued a statement earlier this year calling out election disinformation campaigns by Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
This post ZeroFOX Seeks to Protect Election Campaigns originally appeared on InfoSecurity Magazine.
