14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook's Head of Cybersecurity Policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, announced the addition of extra cybersecurity measures designed to protect both candidates and staff during US political campaigns.
The new security tools are designed to allow campaign staff to be one step ahead of threat actors who might want to use Facebook as a platform for delivering misinformation and malicious content.
Moreover, these new cybersecurity-focused tools introduced by this pilot program come to complement the ones already put in place by Facebook, and will help secure elected officials and candidates in future elections around the world and the US.
The pilot program is also meant to help Facebook recognize campaign-affiliated users faster by allowing federal or statewide office candidates and their representatives to enable additional security defenses for official campaign pages, such as monitoring for potential hacking threats and two-factor authentication for increased authentication security.
Campaign page administrators are required to visit politics.fb.com/campaignsecurity to enroll in the pilot program, the portal subsequently allowing them to add extra campaign members who will benefit from the additional security measures put in place by the page admins.
Facebook will monitor hacking threats evolution throughout political campaigns and add 2FA to official campaign pages
Facebook's new campaign security tools will allow the social network to react faster to reported attacks against campaign officials, while also being able to review and protect any other accounts enrolled in the pilot program for the attacked campaign page.
"As we detect abuse, we will continue to share relevant information with law enforcement and other companies so we can maximize our effectiveness, said Gleicher. "And, we are continually assessing how this pilot and our other security programs might be expanded to future elections and other users, such as government officials."
The campaign-focused cybersecurity tools added through the pilot program by Facebook are not the only ones Facebook uses to secure official accounts against bad actors.
In the last few months, the social network also added a new political and ads transparency standard, new tools to detect and block false news, and mechanisms designed to find and remove fake accounts used to spread misinformation.