Securing the 2020 Presidential Campaign: Threats, Challenges, and a Global Pandemic!

This panel looks at how US presidential campaigns run and why their security is difficult. Panelists from the DNC, the Biden campaign, a campaign data firm and the fundraising platform ActBlue explain that a campaign behaves like a startup with a fixed end date: thousands of staff join and leave within months, and many vendors are one- or two-person shops. During the primaries, the DNC offered security guidance to more than twenty campaigns before a nominee was known, so that whoever won would start from a solid baseline.

The discussion then turns to 2020, when the pandemic pushed campaigns fully remote. Staff were onboarded without anyone touching their laptops, so teams leaned on a basic checklist covering updates, two-factor authentication, password managers and hardware security keys. Panelists described support sessions for people new to security keys, shortages of Chromebooks, and a discount program for federal campaigns that made keys cheaper. Software left over from earlier cycles was reviewed and shared as common infrastructure rather than rebuilt every four years. Disinformation and attacks on donation flows were also named as newer concerns.

For practitioners, the panel stressed that security must stay a priority between election cycles, since a lack of major incidents can make it look unnecessary. Controls should be secure by default and easy to use, and hiring for security and IT roles was encouraged ahead of the 2022 and 2024 cycles.