The National Security Agency reportedly is working with private companies to thwart foreign digital threats aimed at interfering with the November presidential election.
The NSA's Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, which has enlisted more than 1,000 cybersecurity companies since it launched approximately four years ago, makes sure private sector partners are kept informed of foreign threats that apply to the companies' work, The Washington Times reported.
"It’s generally the big [internet service providers], the cloud providers, the managed service providers, the cybersecurity companies, those are the portfolios that we partner with to defend the defense industrial base as well and they are also capable of generally defending our elections as well," NSA Cybersecurity Collaboration Center Director Kristina Walter said, the Times reported. "We will work with them kind of at scale to do that."
The NSA relies on a separate team at the Collaboration Center to make sure private sector partners are kept informed of foreign threats.
"If there’s an attempt for a malicious actor to abuse a U.S. platform to target elections, we can share that information through the Collaboration Center from the [NSA and U.S. Cyber Command’s] Election Security Group with that partner so that they can disrupt the activity," Walter said last week while at the Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington, D.C.
A senior U.S. intelligence official last week told Reuters that Russia, China and Iran are trying to interfere with this year’s U.S. presidential election.
Russia is the most active foreign adversary trying to influence the election, while China is more focused on influencing down-ballot races, said the official, who added that Iran is more active than in past cycles.
While NSA does not offer much specifics on its private partners, CrowdStrike Senior Vice President Adam Meyers spoke of his company’s work with NSA on matters involving election security and threats to the financial sector.
At the CrowdStrike Gov Threat Summit in March, Meyers said the NSA had "sent us a lot of stuff" as part of its work with the spy agency.
The Times reported Microsoft also has teamed with the NSA, particularly in defense of Ukraine against Russian cyberattackers.