CISA Warns of Russian Efforts to Sow Chaos Around Election

In some sense this is not news. Given the West’s pressure on Russia since Ukraine, Russia would love to stick it to us. They tried hacking election systems in 2016 and a little bit in 2020, but even if they were successful, the impact was too isolated to make a difference.

So a new strategy. Sow doubt and chaos by flooding social media with all sorts of lies. After all, social media is not exactly truth central, so their efforts won’t stand out as obvious.

CISA director Jen Easterly was interviewed on News Hour and while she could not talk about specific cases, it is still interesting.

One thing Russia is doing is creating deep fake videos. One showed someone open ballots in Bucks County, PA and tearing up votes for Trump. This was very quickly attributed to Russia’s Storm-1516 and outed as fake.

Easterly said that since 2020 they have been working really hard to speed up the attribution process and that is working.

There was another fake video. This one accused Harris of poaching a rhino in Zambia. Microsoft says they think this was another effort of Storm-1516.

She said that they learned a lot from Russia’s tactics in 2016. They discovered that Russia, China and Iran all operate slightly different.

As to whether Russia plans to incite violence after the election, she said the intelligence indicates this is likely. With Trump and his minions piling on for good measure. Hopefully the feds have a better game plan than they did in 2020.

Then there interview moved to China’s hack of Verizon and other carriers. The story is that among the victims were Trump, Vance, Harris, Walz and other very senior politicians. Like affecting the elections, China learns there are two ways to hack a politician’s phone. One requires that you compromise one phone at a time. The other, hack one carrier and you get a lot of phones at once.

The Washington Post reported that the hackers intercepted calls and text of a “Trump team advisor” – unnamed. This lines up with the story that China got into the carriers’ wiretap portals which could have allowed them to tap these phones. This item came from the South China Post, so consider the source.

While nothing is perfect, CISA and the FBI have learned a lot over the last eight years and this election is likely to be the most secure in history. Not perfect, but pretty damn good.

Read the rest of the interview with Jen at the link. Credit: PBS and SCMP

by