Bill Mann Talks DevOps and Election Security

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My guest on this episode of the Inner Circle podcast is Bill Mann, Chief Product Officer for Centrify. We talk about what Centrify is doing to secure and protect DevOps environments, and then also discuss the Secure the Vote initiative that Centrify is driving in the months leading up to a crucial election this November.

The mantra at Centrify is “Never trust, always verify”. The company is focused on providing streamlined and automated identity and access management. Centrify provides a set of solutions designed to enable companies to securely build and deploy applications using DevOps practices. These solutions centralize and automate access controls to developer toolchains and underlying infrastructure, enhance application security, and enable logging and auditing of privileged activity.

Centrify also wants to help protect the integrity of our elections with zero trust security. To everyone outside of the White House or Fox News (or those that actually listen to or believe them), it has been proven and accepted that Russia engaged in aggressive attempts to influence and disrupt elections in the United States in 2016. Although Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes, he was able to successfully capture enough Electoral Votes to win the election.

Three states made all the difference, and the total vote difference from all three combined was only 77,744. Trump won the Electoral College with a final tally of 306 to 232. Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania combined are worth 46 electoral votes. Had those states gone the other way, President Hillary Clinton would be sitting in the White House with a victory of 278 to 260, and the United States wouldn’t be alienating allies, kissing up to adversaries, and aggressively pursuing an agenda to turn the country into Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale.

77,744. That is only six hundredths of a percent of the total votes cast in the election. When you step back and look at what Russia election hacking was able to do through fake news and propaganda ads on social media sites, and its direct hacks of election boards–it seems probable that meddling by Russia changed the election outcome. They don’t have to hack the actual voting machines and election results–just alter information or purge voter rolls at election boards. It won’t prevent dedicated people from voting anyway, but it sows chaos and you only need six hundredths of a percent of the people to decide it’s not worth the effort to debate it and just go home without voting.

Voila! You get President Trump. Thanks, Russia.

To help guard against a repeat of this election hacking this November, Centrify is offering its zero trust security to election boards at no cost. Tom Kemp, CEO of Centrify, explained, “It is incumbent upon us to protect our citizens’ information, which starts with voter registrations and election integrity. In order to secure the vote, Election Boards need to protect their election systems, and more importantly, sensitive voter registration information against bad actors. That starts with adopting a new mindset that compromised credentials are the main attack vector.”

Check out the podcast to hear what Bill has to say. Subscribe to the Inner Circle podcast on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts from. Please rate, review and share the podcast, and feel free to comment below if you have any feedback.