Bytes and Ballots: Cybersecurity expert shares how emerging digital threats could impact democracy

As the 2024 election cycle approaches, concerns about cybersecurity threats to election integrity are mounting.

Professor Justin DelVecchio, PhD, a cybersecurity expert from Canisius University, is available to provide insights on emerging threats that could potentially jeopardize the upcoming elections.  He can also offer valuable insights into both technical vulnerabilities and the evolving landscape of AI-driven influence campaigns.  His key areas of expertise include:

Election Result Reporting Disruptions:

• Potential hacking of public-facing sites that report local election results
• Impact of site outages on public perception and trust in the election process
• Strategies to mitigate and respond to such attacks

AI-Driven Targeted Influence Campaigns:

• Use of advanced language models to create highly targeted content for voters
• Precision marketing techniques applied to political messaging
• Potential impact on voter behavior and election outcomes

About: 

Justin Del Vecchio, PhD, has more than 20 years of industry experience. He most recently worked for CUBRC Inc., a local defense contractor – a leader in data fusion and analytics. Del Vecchio was a senior program manager that led a team of engineers and interns to develop software solutions for government and private industry. Some of these organizations include the Office of Naval Research, IARPA, Army Corps of Engineers, and Army I2WD.

His projects primarily focus upon information fusion of cyber data sources using machine learning algorithms, and the translation of multiple disparate data sources into situational awareness. Del Vecchio’s dissertation focused upon Android malware analysis. His research helped identify immutable characteristics of malware useful in the identification of new, unseen cyber threats.