Cyber Threats to Canadian Federal Election: Emerging Threats, Assessment, and Mitigation Strategies
Nazmul Islam, Soomin Kim, Mohammad Pirooz, Sasha Shvetsov

TL;DR
This paper conducts a comprehensive cyber threat assessment for Canada's 2025 federal election, identifying key threats like misinformation, infrastructure attacks, and espionage, and proposes mitigation strategies based on the NIST framework.
Contribution
It provides the first detailed national threat assessment for Canada's upcoming election, integrating emerging threats and mitigation strategies using established cybersecurity frameworks.
Findings
Identified three major threats: MDM campaigns, infrastructure attacks, espionage.
Analyzed threat capabilities, intent, and potential impact.
Proposed a multi-faceted mitigation approach for election security.
Abstract
As Canada prepares for the 2025 federal election, ensuring the integrity and security of the electoral process against cyber threats is crucial. Recent foreign interference in elections globally highlight the increasing sophistication of adversaries in exploiting technical and human vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities also exist in Canada's electoral system that relies on a complex network of IT systems, vendors, and personnel. To mitigate these vulnerabilities, a threat assessment is crucial to identify emerging threats, develop incident response capabilities, and build public trust and resilience against cyber threats. Therefore, this paper presents a comprehensive national cyber threat assessment, following the NIST Special Publication 800-30 framework, focusing on identifying and mitigating cybersecurity risks to the upcoming 2025 Canadian federal election. The research identifies…
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Taxonomy
TopicsCybersecurity and Cyber Warfare Studies · Information and Cyber Security · Security, Politics, and Digital Transformation
