Facebook has decided to fund a project to prevent cyber attacks targeting all future Election Campaigns. The decision was taken by the social media giant after Russian hackers rocked the US Presidential elections of 2016 with cyber attacks.
In a recent press release which reached us early today, the worlds largest social network has hinted that it is trying its best to improve the cyber security of political parties, campaigns, and election commissions by backing an initiative run by Hayward University.
Alex Stamos, the Chief Information Security Officer of Facebook said in one its twitter posts that political campaigns need support from the tech industry to “protect the organs of democracy”. He is also in a hope that other tech giants like Google and Microsoft will join the initiative soon.
As the United States is going to witness thousands of local elections in 2018 for 435 house races, 35 senates, 39 gubernatorial races; Facebook wants the IT teams running these campaigns well aware of what they are going to counter in cyber space.
So, in order to create awareness among the populace on cyber threats and to prevent fake news from spreading, Facebook is planning to track all elections campaigns around the world with a monitoring tool to influence operations.
Remember, in DEC’16 former US President Barack Obama criticized social media sites like Facebook for spreading false stories at the time of elections which eventually led to election loss of Hillary Clinton.
Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg, the Founder, and CEO of Facebook has decided to act on it now by taking the responsibility of protecting the integrity of elections. So, his company has taken up the initiative of first eradicating fake news with the help of monitoring tools which help bridge people to connect with politicians and community groups.
Dubbed as the Belfer Center Project, it will have a senior security leader from Google and two former government officials. The project which is being funded by Facebook will first look into the future political campaigns of United States and then will see those which are going to take place outside the US in future.
Mr. Stamos the CIO of Facebook announced the donation to fund the project yesterday in his Keynote speech at the annual Black Hat Cyber Security Conference, Las Vegas.
However, Stamos failed to reveal the size of the fund for some reason.
Furthermore, Stamos disclosed that Facebook is also going to fund $1m Internet Defense Prize for researchers to focus on the best way to defend people, rather than just finding vulnerabilities.
The social media giant has also disclosed details of its CodePath project, meant to develop a new cyber security course at US Universities.
Mr. Stamos believes that Facebook’s Initiative will help in speeding up the slowed progress on a wide range of online challenges, such as not recognizing and documenting the extent of the abuse faced by women online.
Stamos feels that the security community needs more diverse people, backgrounds and thought to live up to the potential-very true!
