Assessing the chances Russia will meddle in 2018 election
Nearly a year after Russian government hackers meddled in the 2016 U.S. election, researchers at cybersecurity firm Trend Micro zeroed in on a new sign of trouble: a group of suspect websites.
The sites mimicked a portal used by U.S. senators and their staffs, with easy-to-miss discrepancies. Emails to Senate users urged them to reset their passwords — an apparent attempt to steal them.
Once again, hackers on the outside of the American political system were probing for a way in.
“Their attack methods continue to take advantage of human nature and when you get into an election cycle the targets are very public ,” said Mark Nunnikhoven, vice president of cloud research at Trend Micro. Now the U.S. has entered a new election cycle. And the attempt to infiltrate the Senate network, linked to hackers aligned with Russia and brought to public attention in July, is a reminder of the risks, and the difficulty of assessing them.
Newly reported attempts at infiltration and social media manipulation — which Moscow officially denies — point to Russia’s continued interest in meddling in U.S. politics. There is no clear evidence, experts said, of efforts by the Kremlin specifically designed to disrupt elections in November. But it wouldn’t take much to cause turmoil.
“It’s not a question of whether somebody is going to try to breach the system, to manipulate the system, to influence the system,” said Robby Mook, who managed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and co-directs a Harvard University project to protect democracy from cyberattacks, in an interview earlier this year. “The question is: Are we prepared for it?”
Online targeting of the U.S. political system has come on three fronts — efforts to get inside political campaigns and institutions and expose damaging information; probes of electoral systems, potentially to alter voter data and results; and fake ads and accounts on social media used to spread disinformation and fan divisions among Americans.
In recent weeks, Microsoft reported that it had disabled six Russian-launched websites masquerading as U.S. think tanks and Senate sites. Facebook and the security firm FireEye revealed influence campaigns , originating in Iran and Russia, that led the social network to remove 652 impostor accounts, some targeted at Americans. The office of Republican Sen. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said hackers tied to a “nation-state” had sent phishing emails to old campaign email accounts.
U.S. officials said they have not detected any attempts to corrupt election systems or leak information rivaling Kremlin hacking before President Donald Trump’s surprise 2016 victory.
Still, “we fully realize that we are just one click away of the keyboard from a similar situation repeating itself,” Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, said in July.
Michael McFaul, the architect of the Obama administration’s Russia policy, has said he believes Russian President Vladimir Putin perceives little benefit in a major disruption effort this year, preferring to keep his powder dry for the 2020 presidential contest. But even if the upcoming elections escape disruption, that hardly means the U.S. is in the clear .
Trump’s decision in May to eliminate the post of White House cybersecurity coordinator confirmed his lack of interest in countering Russian meddling, critics say. Congress has not delivered any legislation to combat election interference or disinformation. Last week, a review of the bipartisan “Secure Elections Act” was canceled after Republican leaders registered objections, congressional staffers said.
The risks extend beyond the midterms.
“The biggest question is going to be how are you going to make sure that people actually trust the results, because democracy relies on credibility,” said Ben Nimmo, a researcher at the Atlantic Council. “It’s not over after November.”
Experts said it is too late to safeguard U.S. voting systems and campaigns this election cycle. But with two months to go, there is time enough to take stock of the Russian-sponsored interference that has come to light so far — and to assess the risks of what we don’t know.
In mid-2016, hackers found a way into the voter registration database at the Illinois State Board of Elections and spent three weeks poking around. After the breach was discovered, officials said the infiltrators had downloaded the records of up to 90,000 voters. It’s not clear that anything nefarious was done with those records. But when special counsel Robert Mueller charged a dozen Russian intelligence agents with hacking this July, the indictment clarified the potential for damage.