Russia Still Hacking Elections – Only Smarter

While Russia is not the only country who wants to mess with our elections, the do have a lot of experience at it.

During the 2016 and 2018 elections, they figured no one was minding the store, so they went about their disinformation campaigns very blatantly. After all, why bother to hide your actions if no one seems to care.

Fast forward to 2020 and Chris Krebs and his team at DHS’s CISA is working hard to make it more difficult to hack the elections.

During the 2016 elections there were numerous attempts to hack voter rolls. While only a few were successful, that doesn’t mean they and others are going to stop trying. Combine that with the fact that once you have done that, how can you use that to affect the election?

During the 2020 election cycle the Russians in particular, are being more creative. They seem to be focusing on disinformation. That way they can get the American electorate to do their dirty work.

For example, this week Facebook announced that a Kremlin disinformation campaign hired U.S. journalists to write stories that pushed the Kremlin’s agenda. U.S. journalists writing stories in the U.S. Hard to detect. They created a fake online media company and even created fake personas of the editors using computer generated images.

The Russian hackers we identified from the last elections are sitting on the sidelines for now. They could, for example, release an October surprise like a bunch of hacked data from which ever candidate they want to hurt.

The Russians are using more Russia based servers which we have less visibility into and are using proxies in other countries such as different African countries to make it harder to pinpoint what is happening.

The Russians are running multiple parallel efforts. Some of the ones already identified are the Internet Research Agency (from 2016), APT 28, APT 29, and GRU Unit 74455. Some of these go back to 2016, which means that just knowing they exist doesn’t make them ineffective.

And these folks are not one-trick ponies. They run malware operations, spearphishing of particular targets, targeted intrusions and other dirty tricks.

But we have to remember that Russia is just one of the dirty trick operations. Others include China, Iran and North Korea. The current Republican administration is more focused on China than Russia, but some experts say that is a mistake. China seems to be more focused (but not completely focused) on internal politics, while Russia is going after the United States. Credit: The Record

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