Forget Mueller: Our pants are still down on election security, and Facebook can't save us

These days, commentators from the tech industry are mostly focused on the role Facebook and other social media companies played as Russian operatives tried to influence the 2016 election. Facebook itself has spent a lot of the last two years talking about the steps it's taking to prevent being used for misinformation in future elections.

But during the conference, Mueller only touched briefly on that topic:

"...a private Russian entity engaged in a social media operation where Russian citizens posed as Americans in order to influence an election."

I'm not a Facebook apologist. But we shouldn't be leaning on social media companies to protect our elections. We should be relying on the federal government.

The Mueller probe has not improved how we think about cybersecurity. All it's done is move the needle on what individuals think went "wrong" with the 2016 election, based on their political leanings.

Here is what really went wrong. In Russia, a secret intelligence unit spent years — well before Trump's rise — prepping for a campaign of chaos-driven social engineering that was most likely meant to throw a wrench into American discourse and sow division.

At DNC headquarters, weak passwords and bad security hygiene made it easy for operatives to steal information and inject it into this chaos cycle.

Poorly trained staff in Trump's inner and outer circles also made it easy for this same Russian department to trick them into associating with fake accounts on social media, including highly inflammatory accounts advocating for the most extreme right-wing positions, according to the report.

In the run-up to the election, secretaries of state across the U.S. did not tap into federal awareness efforts on election hacking. In Florida, this led to a breach of voter databases — though not voting machines themselves, a critical distinction.

Talking about "collusion" and "interference" misses this critical point: The 2016 election problems were the result of a multi-pronged cyberattack that none of these parties were prepared for.