Breaking: Major National Cybersecurity Exercise on Election Day; What???

Read Part 2, here.

Background: “AFCEA [Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International] Atlanta [Chapter] Homeland Security Conference on Critical Infrastructure, November 6-7, 2024, with a large scale cybersecurity exercise on November 5, 2024” (link in footnote)

—On Nov. 5, ELECTION DAY, there will be a special cybersecurity exercise at the Conference.

Get this. The exercise is described as a large-scale interactive event, with participants from federal, state, county, city government agencies, academia, and industry.

The exercise will simulate a cyber-attack on “critical infrastructure.”

That’s right. It’s a so-called “Jack Voltaic”-type exercise, which was developed to test responses to attacks on large infrastructures.

QUITE odd to schedule the exercise on Election Day.

QUITE odd to run an exercise simulating a cyber-attack on critical infrastructure ON ELECTION DAY, especially since electronic voting across the nation IS a piece of critical infrastructure.

IF bad actors were looking to mess with electronic voting, this exercise would create a reasonable cover and method.

If the actors wanted to rig electronic voting and needed an excuse to explain “anomalies” in the vote count, or to explain a sudden shut-down of key voting precincts, the cyber-exercise would provide those explanations.

“Well, you see, there was a temporary glitch owing to the fact that, parallel to Election Day voting, Homeland Security was running a crucial but unrelated cyber-exercise, and ‘wires were crossed,’ so to speak…”

“Nothing to see here, the problem was fixed, and the exercise proceeded, as did the vote count. Occasionally, these things happen. Homeland Security assures us that voting was not impeded…”

“Of course, some people are spreading rumors and conspiracy theories about ‘altered vote counts’. These accusations are entirely unfounded. The Homeland Security exercise had nothing to do with the vote count…”

“Accusations of vote rigging are very serious. They could be, in some cases, considered a form of election interference (if we, the government, want to shut people up and shut them down and obscure what we’re really doing)…”

—But again, scheduling a major Homeland Security cyber-exercise simulating an attack on critical infrastructure? ON ELECTION DAY? Really?

At the very least, it’s a great way for government to get people to distrust government.

CODA: You might be interested in reading the Wikipedia entry for the group, AFCEA, which is sponsoring the upcoming November Conference and the cyber-security exercise. It reads in part:

“Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association International (AFCEA), established in 1946, is a nonprofit membership association serving the military, government, industry, and academia as a forum for advancing professional knowledge and relationships in the fields of communications, information technology, intelligence and global security. AFCEA provides a forum for military, government, academic and industry communities with altogether more than 30,000 members. AFCEA supports local chapters, sponsors events, publishes a magazine, promotes STEM education and provides member benefits.

“SIGNAL, not to be confused with the German Signal magazine, is a monthly [AFCEA] international news magazine targeting government, military and industry professionals active in the information technology and intelligence fields. The magazine was started in 1946. Among the topics covered in the magazine are command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR); information security; cybersecurity; research and development; artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data, cloud technologies, electronics; and homeland security.”

-- Jon Rappoport

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