The long and winding road towards the 2016 U.S.
Presidential election is poised to come to a merciful end this
week. In turn, it won't be long before we can finally close the
books on what has unquestionably been the most outrageous,
entertaining, depressing and downright confounding U.S. election in
recent memory, and perhaps of all-time.
With just a few days before most Americans get out and vote, the
drama surrounding this year's election shows no sign of dying down.
Over the weekend, U.S. intelligence sources told NBC that a number
of government security agencies are ready to detect, defend
against, and if need be, fight back against any Russian attempts to
impact this week's election. Now in any other year, this story
might appear to be utter nonsense, but it's really just par for the
course for this current election cycle where sensationalist stories
have become the norm.
According to the report, the White House has been working with
the NSA, the Defense Department, the CIA and other agencies to
ensure that disinformation campaigns don't pick up any traction and
to prevent any type of election-oriented digital attacks from
taking place.
The U.S. government believes hackers from Russia or elsewhere
may try to undermine next week's presidential election and is
mounting an unprecedented effort to counter their cyber meddling,
American officials told NBC News.
For example, officials fear an 11th hour release of fake
documents implicating one of the candidates in an explosive scandal
without time for the news media to fact check it. So far, document
dumps attributed to the Russians have damaged Democrats and favored
Trump.
Given that disinformation can spread incredibly quickly, it's
perfectly understandable that defense officials will be on
high-alert this week. Interestingly enough, the report also adds
that some within the defense community are viewing October's
massive DDoS attack as a dry run for what may ultimately be a more
significant attack scheduled to get underway this coming
Tuesday.
While multiple intelligence officials told NBC that they have no
specific warning about an Election Day attack, they also say they
consider the massive and sophisticated internet disruption of
Friday, Oct. 21, a potential dry run.
The "distributed denial of service" attack on equipment provided
by the company DYN, which took down popular internet sites like
PayPal and Amazon for hours, "had all the signs of what would be
considered a drill," said Ann Barron-DiCamillo, former director of
Homeland Security's computer emergency readiness team.
Predictably, Russia has thus far denied that it has had anything
to do with the current U.S. election. However, a joint statement
from the DHS and the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence released a month ago begs to differ, reading in
part:
The U.S. Intelligence Community (USIC) is confident that the
Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from
US persons and institutions, including from US political
organizations. The recent disclosures of alleged hacked e-mails on
sites like DCLeaks.com and WikiLeaks and by the Guccifer 2.0 online
persona are consistent with the methods and motivations of
Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended
to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new
to Moscow—the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques
across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion
there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these
efforts, that only Russia's senior-most officials could have
authorized these activities.