Hacking the Elections

Quick key take aways from Hacking the Elections by Ian Gray

-- The U.S. election landscape is made up of approximately 9,000 different state and local jurisdictions, providing a patchwork of laws, standards, processes, and voting machines. This environment is a formidable challenge to any actor -- nation-state or not -- who seeks to substantially influence or alter the outcome of an election. Doing so would require mastering a large number of these disparate cyber environments and finding a multitude of ways to manipulate them. An operation of this size would require vast resources over a multi-year period -- an operation that would likely be detected and countered before it could come to fruition.

-- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues to claim objectivity and transparency in his reporting; however, recent events have shown that WikiLeaks may be a pawn -- witting or unwitting -- that has been leveraged by the Russian government as an outlet for stolen information damaging to the Democratic National Party

-- While Guccifer 2.0’s sources are debatable, the hacker has indeed been effective in launching an information and propaganda campaign that has, at least to some degree, disrupted the track of the U.S. election.

-- Aside from the various political-influence campaigns, the FBI has confirmed that malicious actors have been scanning and probing state voter databases for vulnerabilities. Though the actors were operating on servers hosted by a Russian company, those attacks are not, for the moment, being attributed to an actual Russian state-sponsored campaign.

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