Here's the truth about the recent latest cyberattacks targeting the U.S. election
October 29, 2020 in Blogs
By Independent Media Institute
Two weeks before Election Day, cybersecurity threats and related disinformation originating overseas and targeting the 2020 election briefly were front-page news.
Threatening emails to voters supporting Democrats were purportedly sent by the Proud Boys, a pro-Trump white nationalist group. State voter registration databases in Alaska and Florida were purportedly breached, and videos containing non-public voter information were posted online. As federal agencies blamed Iran and Russia, an anxious electorate faced more worries.
“Sad but true, bad actors continue their attempts to undermine confidence in the election, now w/ a misleading video,” tweeted Chris Krebs, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) director, in one “Rumor Control” post on October 21. “Stay calm and vote on.”
The incidents—which were described, deconstructed, and debunked in non-technical terms in a Stanford Internet Observatory report issued two days later—came in the same week that the U.S. passed the 50 million mark for ballots already cast. The attacks may have been headline news, but they did not dent record turnout. Their false claims were swiftly outed and then drowned out by domestic noisemakers.
“Of course when it comes to spreading false information, the Russians have plenty of help from the President and his media allies,” wrote longtime journalist Nina Burleigh on Deep State blog, which monitors the world’s intelligence agencies, launching its series on foreign interference in the 2020 election.
Nonetheless, top federal officials who are allies of the president said the alleged Proud Boy emails and purloined voter registration data were concrete evidence of Russian and Iranian attempts to influence the 2020 election in its final weeks. But as news reports were filled with murky accusations, the Stanford researchers—who include some of Silicon Valley’s foremost cybersecurity experts—concluded that no election data or computer systems had been breached. Instead, the propagandists—and the researchers found no trace of Iranian involvement—fabricated content to fuel the impression that the 2020 nationwide election cannot be trusted.
“This series of events represents an active measures campaign intended to create the perception of a massive vulnerability in the U.S. election system that does not exist, and possibly to drive tension in the United States through the invocation of a well-known hate group,” …read more
Source: ALTERNET
Recent Comments