During the 2020 U.S. elections, voters mailed in more than 65 million ballots to lock in their vote. However, lack of consistency across the public sector — with voting and election security standards varying across state lines or missing altogether — may have been a risk to voters’ faith in the process.

“People need to have faith in the process, faith in the technology, need to have a clear source to get their information from the process,” said Mick Baccio (pictured), security advisor at Splunk and former CISO for the Pete Buttigieg campaign.

Baccio spoke with Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed how cybersecurity has become increasingly challenging in both the public and private sector as communicating, working and voting remotely becomes the norm. (* Disclosure below.)

Shift to remote communication has big implications for security

“State to state we have different standards. And that kind of leads to confusion with people, because, hey, my friend in Washington did it this way, but I’m in Texas and we do it this way,” said Baccio. “And I think that that standard would help a lot in the faith in the system. And then the last part of that, the technology, you know, voting machines, campaigns … there’s nothing that says a campaign has to have a security person or a security program.”

In the same way that COVID created new challenges for election security, the pivot to remote work has also changed the threats that workers face. Now, cybersecurity experts are working to defeat attackers that may target personal accounts more often than enterprise systems.

“I can make sure this system is super, super secure, but it’s your personal threat model, you know,” Baccio said. “Your personal email account, your personal social media, putting more security on those and being aware of those, I think that awareness is growing.”

Baccio also sees more people in the security community “preaching that awareness more and more.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent. (*Disclosure: Splunk Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Splunk nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE