(CNN)Next month, America will elect a new president. Most likely there will be no cyber hanging-chad moment, no massive breach that calls into question election results or faith in the democratic process.
But it would be a mistake to breathe a collective sigh of relief on November 9th and conclude the danger is past. The danger is just beginning. The 2016 election is a warning of darker hacks to come.
The strategy starts by building better defenses, including legislating minimum cyber security standards for party, PAC, and campaign-related websites for presidential elections. That would include paper audit trails in every state, starting with large battlegrounds, so that our election process can be resilient even if attacked. Building resilience also requires changing minds, not just systems. Public education is essential. Future cyber attacks could alter the integrity of data so the truth will be hard to know. Today, when a breach occurs, we assume the information released must be true. In the future, we need to assume that anything leaked could be false, designed to deceive and manipulate. Because increasingly, it will. Finally, the US government needs to start attributing election-related breaches as quickly as possible unless there is a compelling intelligence reason not to. For months, the Russian government's election hacking was the worst-kept secret in Washington; everyone knew it, but the White House refused to acknowledge it. This sends all the wrong signals, emboldening bad actors to do more tomorrow than they did today.
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