Case Study: Major U.S. City achieves election-day network resilience and voter-data protection with Trustwave

Major U.S. City - Customer Case Study

Major U.S. City faced a heightened election-security challenge after a distributed denial-of-service attack and growing concern over “non‑air‑gapped” systems that transmit precinct totals and voter registration data. With mail-in paper ballots but vulnerable network links, the city’s CISO turned to long-time vendor Trustwave to perform a managed security test (remote penetration testing) to assess how an attacker might compromise election-related systems.

Trustwave ran a virtual remote penetration test installed on a municipal workstation, conducting several days of attacks including privilege escalation, IP redirection, session hijacking, password capture, spoofing and man‑in‑the‑middle techniques. The testing exposed exploitable weaknesses, enabling the city to prioritize remediation, protect voter data and free the CISO to focus on oversight of 50‑plus city and county agencies — a tangible improvement in the municipality’s election-system resilience driven by Trustwave’s assessment.