Insights

Fortifying a political candidate, their campaign team, and their war room.

Long gone is the war room in Little Rock, Arkansas, where political consultants James Carville and Paul Begala led the campaign that would bring Bill Clinton to the presidency of the United States in 1990.

More than 30 years later, political strategies have embraced the world of the internet and social media to understand the citizenry. However, they still heavily rely on internal communications through applications like WhatsApp, using personal mobile phones and internet connections accessible to anyone. They share campaign-sensitive data through platforms like Dropbox or Drive, often without considering how close electoral defeat could be if proper cybersecurity strategies are not in place. A renowned political strategist and a dear friend of mine once said that a lack of cybersecurity strategy could cost or gain up to 10% of the votes.

This is where the role of the war room, or as we like to call it, the "cúpulas," comes into play. It is a single location with two separate sites: a primary one and a backup in case of disaster. These sites are isolated, anonymous, private, and heavily fortified.

Let's consider one of our success stories during the presidential elections in a Central American country. The campaign team of a candidate who was third in the polls for the country's presidency decided to rely on our expertise in infrastructure defense to protect themselves from cyber warfare and cyber-extortion, unfortunately linked to every electoral campaign, whether it's for a mayoral position or the presidency of a national government.

Some of the key factors to guarantee the cyber success of a robust war room are:

Increase the team awareness: People are the key to success.
The mobile phone plays a critical role. Anonymity and privacy should be prioritized above all else.
Prepare for a disaster.
Practice the obsessive-preventive model.
Generate randomness in password usage, mobile phones, internet connections, and even the routes taken to reach the war room.
Utilize physical authentication factors that are not connected to the internet for identification.
Something I HAVE, like a YubiKey hardware authentication device.
Something I AM, for example, a fingerprint.
Analyze, monitor, but above all, listen to your surroundings.
Individual, nominal, encrypted, and well-protected devices.
Think in pairs.
Double the communication channels, as the primary ones are likely to fail. Personal residences are often weak points.
Double the security tools.
Double the working equipment or, at the very least, have spares.
Duplicate decision-making, especially in urgent and uncertain moments.
And last but not least, trust nothing and no one. This is a good method to detect betrayals and prevent leaks.

Daniel Aranda
Digital Security Advisor and Privacy Expert

External Insights

Visualize on real-time the cyberthreats happening accross the globe

Fortifying a political candidate, their campaign team, and their war room.

Visualize on real-time the cyberthreats happening accross the globe

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