In the United States, state and local governments are responsible for maintaining democratic processes by ensuring the availability and resiliency of election systems, the integrity and accuracy of balloting and vote tabulation, and the confidentiality of individual citizens’ votes. Since the Department of Homeland Security deemed election systems to be critical infrastructure, State and Local election boards must take additional steps to ensure the integrity of the vote at every level. Aging infrastructure and targeted attacks are key challenges
Read this use case for a real-world example of how a U.S. state agency is taking steps to secure the vote with Palo Alto Networks. The benefits they have realized include:
Operational Benefits
- Reduce risk with granular visibility into the users, applications, and traffic of election systems infrastructure
- Enable States to offer secure networking services for elections for underfunded or understaffed local governments
- Improve cybersecurity efficiency by automatically consuming and sharing threat insights and indicators from multiple intelligence feeds, safeguarding assets and keeping them up to date
Security Benefits
- Protect unpatched voting machines and systems for tabulating and reporting election results
- Limit exposure of voter registration database with network segmentation
- Prevent credential theft and data exfiltration
- Enforce access controls and the principle of least privilege with user identification and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
For more information on how Palo Alto Networks serves state, city, county, and municipal governments, visit our cybersecurity for state and local governments page at www.paloaltonetworks.com/cybersecurity-for-state-local-government
