This week both CNN and Newsweek have interesting articles about the potential threat of Russian hacking on the up-coming election. Newsweek’s Jeff Stein states that Vladimir Putin is trying to cause doubt about the fairness of the American election. He states:
“An increasing number of Americans are already disposed to thinking the election could be rigged, according to a mid-August poll by the Gallup organization. Only 62 percent of Americans “are confident that votes will be accurately cast and counted in the coming election,” Gallup said. …. The GOP’s propaganda campaign—baseless, in the view of independent analysts—gave Russian hackers an opportunity to further exploit voters’ doubts with surreptitious “influence operations.”
“The risk is not so much the hacking of the voting machines themselves, (which have decent if not great checks), but rather going after the broader climate that surrounds an election,” says Peter Singer, a strategist at the New America think tank and author ofWired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. The larger goal is “to sow doubt and disarray,” he tells Newsweek. “Indeed,” he adds, even if the Kremlin hasn’t had a hand in some of the hacks, it can further its goals by using “social media outlets and RT [Russia Today, another arm of Kremlin propaganda] to spread false information and claims about it happening.”
Vladimir Putin’s disinformation war’s intent is to disrupt the enemy.
“The objective is... certainly, to create centres which would envisage so-called hacker attacks on enemy territory,” Igor Panarin, a leading Russian military authority, wrote in 2008, according to the U.K.-based Conflict Studies Center at Oxford University. The object would be to identify “critically important information entities of the enemy, including how to eliminate them physically, and how to conduct electronic warfare, psychological warfare, systemic counter propaganda, and net operations to include hacker training.”
www.newsweek.com/…
Amy Zegart, for CNN, focuses on what the United States can do to reduce the potential turmoil caused by Russian hacking and disinformation. She states
“Instead of deterrence by punishment, the US should implement a policy of deterrence by denial. The goal is to deny adversaries the outcomes they seek -- in this case, by rendering cyber election hacks insignificant to our democratic process.”
And
”The strategy starts by building better defenses, including legislating minimum cyber security standards for party, PAC, and campaign-related websites for presidential elections. That would include paper audit trails in every state, starting with large battlegrounds, so that our election process can be resilient even if attacked.
Building resilience also requires changing minds, not just systems. Public education is essential. Future cyber attacks could alter the integrity of data so the truth will be hard to know.
Today, when a breach occurs, we assume the information released must be true. In the future, we need to assume that anything leaked could be false, designed to deceive and manipulate. Because increasingly, it will.”
Read more here
Also see the Bloomberg article on the same subject of Putin’s influence.