Cybersecurity is essential for democracy

Alexandra Fotaki

Adam Clayton Powell III is Director of the University of Southern California Election Cybersecurity Initiative and a keynote speaker in the hybrid international conference Cybersecuring Democracy which will take place in Athens on June 2, 2022 in cooperation with the Department of International and European Studies of the University of Piraeus, the   University of Southern California Institute for Technology Enabled Higher Education (USC ITEHE) and the Council for International Relations (CfIR).

Cybersecurity and Democracy. How are they related? 

Security is essential for democracy, as Greece discovered before anyone else.  Cybersecurity is a present-day iteration of security, and it is no less essential than physical security has been for centuries. The enemies of democracy have seized on this, devising ever evolving cyber attacks to try to weaken democracies across the world and to try to shake faith in democracy itself.

Cyber security also has a role to play in defense? How important is this in the 21st century and what consequences could a hacker attack have? 

Cybersecurity is essential for defense. Our team at USC monitors news media for a weekly cybersecurity news report that we email to thousands of subscribers, and we see accounts of malware, ransomware and other cyberattacks all over the world - and only some attacks are public.

We are only beginning to understand the damage a skilled bad actor can cause. Across the U.S., hospitals and schools have been hit with ransomware, where the institution's networks are frozen and held hostage...