Episode 171: Stopping the 21st Century’s Plumbers – Defending Digital Campaigns from Hackers

Written by Paul Roberts

In this week’s episode of the podcast (#171): as voters go to the polls in the UK and primaries loom here in the U.S., we sit down with Michael Kaiser, the CEO of a new group: Defending Digital Campaigns and Joel Wallenstrom, the CEO of secure collaboration platform Wickr to discuss efforts to extend an information security lifeline to political campaigns in an era of epidemic campaign hacking and online disinformation.

Cyber attacks on high profile political campaigns aren’t just an artifact of the 2016 presidential campaign in the U.S. or the 2015 Brexit referendum in the UK. In fact, attacks on campaigns – at home and abroad- predate those events and have now become more the rule than the exception. Just in the last year, there is evidence of campaign hacks and damaging leaks in the US midterm elections and in the lead-up to this week’s Parliamentary elections in the UK.