AWS Public Sector Blog

AWS announces low-to-no cost security services for federal political campaigns and committees

It is essential for election campaigns and committees to have access to the latest security services so they can mitigate risks against security threats at minimal cost. Access to security tools and resources that protect information, identities, applications, and devices is essential to the integrity of the election process. To support this, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is collaborating with Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC) to offer more than 20 cybersecurity-related AWS services for low-to-no cost to all active and registered national party committees and federal candidate committees for the US House and US Senate midterm elections that are eligible in accordance with DDC and Federal Election Commission (FEC) criteria.

Defending Digital Campaigns (DDC) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, and non-aligned organization that provides election campaigns access to cybersecurity products, services, and information, regardless of party affiliation. DDC works with technology companies to make their services available directly to eligible committees at low-to-no cost, as well as education and information sharing for campaign professionals. The FEC granted special permission for DDC to operate under this model, providing all eligible party and candidate committees—regardless of party—with the support they need within the limits of campaign finance law.

As part of this collaboration, AWS is offering an extensive suite of cybersecurity and cybersecurity-related services as a part of this program: AWS Audit Manager, AWS Certificate Manager, AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch Logs, Amazon Cognito, AWS Config, AWS Control Tower, Amazon Detective, AWS Firewall Manager, Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon Inspector, AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), Amazon Macie, AWS Network Firewall, AWS Resource Access Manager, AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Security Hub, AWS IAM Identity Center (successor to AWS Single Sign-On), AWS Shield Advanced, AWS WAF, and AWS Wickr.

Learn more about how these AWS services can support election campaign cybersecurity

This offering enables eligible campaigns and party committees to build a wide range of security capabilities. For example, campaigns can detect and mitigate distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks with AWS Shield Advanced. They can use machine learning (ML) and pattern matching to discover and protect their sensitive data with Amazon Macie. Campaigns can continuously monitor their AWS accounts, instances, container workloads, users, and storage for potential threats, and then expose those potential threats and mitigate them with Amazon GuardDuty. And this is just a small sample of what is possible with the AWS services contained in this offering.

“AWS’s offering as a part of DDC will be critical to our mission to secure our democratic campaign process by providing eligible campaigns and political parties, committees, and related organizations with knowledge, training, and resources to defend themselves from cyber threats,” said Michael Kaiser, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of DDC.

Many previous campaigns and party committees have used AWS, such as Obama for America in 2012, the Democratic National Committee, and the Republican National Committee.

If your campaign or committee is interested in utilizing this program, click here to enroll your campaign in AWS security services for federal political campaigns. If you have any questions regarding this program, reach out to your account team for more information, or send an inquiry to the AWS Public Sector Team.

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