Election War Games: How I Tried to Undermine Democracy

They brought me in through the back door. I had been standing on the steps of the San Francisco Mint building and staring at a heavy, gold-painted door that was chained shut, until I was given better directions. Once inside, I was led down a dark hallway that, like most of the 19th-century building, was lined with crumbling brick. We turned, passed through an ancient but still impressive vault door, and into a small room with two tables, several journalists, and representatives from the security company Cybereason. We were there to hack an election.

- Max Eddy

This wouldn’t be a real hack, of course. Instead, we had all stepped away from the cybersecurity-focused RSA Conference to play a wargame in which teams explore hypothetical ways to undermine (or to save) a US election. Think of it like a game of Dungeons and Dragons, except with election meddling instead of magic missiles. The game is the fifth such simulation carried out by Cybereason since 2018.

RED VS. BLUE

Sam Curry, Cybereason CSO, divided us into teams. Most of us were on the Red Team—the bad guys. We were a domestic hacking group called Kill Organized Systems (K-OS). It’s like “chaos”—get it? But chaos wasn’t our actual goal. We were tasked not with disrupting the election or pushing a particular candidate over the top but rather with instilling lasting doubt about the election’s outcome in the populace. Create enough doubt, and the election would be postponed.

The Blue Team—the good guys—were the Adversaria Task Force. Their goal was to protect the election and ensure public safety.

Last, Curry took the role of the White Team; part referee and part game master, his role was to judge the outcomes of each team’s actions. He would also interject new information and changing situations. As a pre-game press release explained, “The goal of the game injections is not to put a thumb on the scales, but rather to help simulate the uncertainty and serendipity that often governs these types of situations.”