Staffers at the Democratic National Committee are being trained to avoid suspicious emails in an effort to head off any potential hacking before the midterm elections, CyberScoop is reporting.
"Nearly 80 percent of our users are now either not clicking or at least asking questions about it beforehand," the DNC's Chief Technology Officer Raffi Krikorian said. "Being realistic we'll probably never get to 100 percent compliance but we're working on it…"
He added: "It's important that people flag something, anything that seems suspicious…
"If we get hacked again it won't happen like how it happened in 2016. If we can just raise the baseline security of most people and the campaigns, if we can do the simple things right, then it will have a disproportionally positive effect."
Since September, Krikorian and his team have been testing colleagues to spot malicious emails. The staffers are given grades on their ability to avoid emails that might carry malware, CyberScoop reported.
"People have such PTSD about what happened in 2016 that there's a real desire to improve (security) here," Krikorian told CyberScoop. "We're at a point now where recently when our CFO sent a staff email it included the line ‘this is not a phishing email.' That's how aware people are of the threat, today."
The training program is geared to staff at the DNC headquarters, state parties and campaigns officially backed by the party. In the coming months, the program will be expanded to include Democratic campaigns for congressional seats in the midterms.
Konstantin Kozlovsky, a jailed Russian hacker, claimed last year that he was directed by a Russian intelligence officer to hack the DNC during the 2016 presidential election.
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