Russian hackers targeted Arizona election system.
FBI: Some voter databases may have been hacked
The bureau described the threat as “credible” and significant, “an eight on a scale of one to 10,” Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan (R), said Monday. As a result, Reagan shut down the state’s voter registration system for nearly a week.
It turned out that the hackers had not compromised the state system or even any county system. They had, however, stolen the username and password of a single election official in Gila County.
Roberts said FBI investigators did not specify whether the hackers were criminals or employed by the Russian government. Bureau officials on Monday declined to comment, except to say that they routinely advise private industry of cyber threats detected in investigations.
The Arizona incident is the latest indication of Russian interest in U.S. elections and party operations, and it follows the discovery of a high-profile penetration into Democratic National Committee computers. That hack produced embarrassing emails that led to the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and sowed dissension on the eve of Hillary Clinton’s nomination as the party’s presidential candidate.
The Russian campaign is also sparking intense anxiety about the security of this year’s elections. Earlier this month, the FBI warned state officials to be on the lookout for intrusions into their election systems. The “flash” alert, which was first reported by Yahoo News, said investigators had detected attempts to penetrate election systems in several states and listed Internet protocol addresses and other technical fingerprints associated with the hacks.
In addition to Arizona, Illinois officials discovered an intrusion into their election system in July. Although the hackers did not alter any data, the intrusion marks the first successful compromise of a state voter registration database, federal officials said.
“This was a highly sophisticated attack most likely from a foreign (international) entity,” said Kyle Thomas, director of voting and registration systems for the Illinois State Board of Elections, in a message that was sent to all election authorities in the state.
The Illinois hackers were able to retrieve voter records, but the number accessed was “a fairly small percentage of the total,” said Ken Menzel, general counsel for the Illinois election board.
State officials alerted the FBI, he said, and the Department of Homeland Security also was involved. The intrusion in Illinois led to a week-long shutdown of the voter registration system.
The FBI has told Illinois officials that it is looking at foreign government agencies and criminal hackers as potential culprits, Menzel said.
At least two other states are looking into possible breaches, officials said. Meanwhile, states across the nation are scrambling to ensure that their systems are secure.
Until now, countries such as Russia and China have shown little interest in voting systems in the United States. But experts said that if a foreign government gained the ability to tamper with voter data — for instance by deleting registration records — such a hack could cast doubt on the legitimacy of U.S. elections.
“I’m less concerned about the attackers getting access to and downloading the information. I’m more concerned about the information being altered, modified or deleted. That’s where the real potential is for any sort of meddling in the election,” said Brian Calkin, vice president of operations for the Center for Internet Security, which operates the MS-ISAC, a multistate information-sharing center that helps government agencies combat cyberthreats and works closely with federal law enforcement.
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has told Congress that manipulation or deletion of data is the next big cyberthreat — “the next push on the envelope.”
Tom Hicks, chairman of the federal Election Assistance Commission, an agency set up by Congress after the 2000 Florida recount to maintain election integrity, said he is confident that states have sufficient safeguards in place to ward off attempts to manipulate data.
For example, if a voter’s name were deleted and did not show up on the precinct list, the individual could still cast a provisional ballot, Hicks said. Once the voter’s status was confirmed, the ballot would be counted.
Hicks also said the actual systems used to cast votes “are not hooked up to the Internet” and so “there’s not going to be any manipulation of data.” However, more than 30 states have some provisions for online voting, primarily for voters living overseas or serving in the military.
This spring, a DHS official cautioned that online voting is not yet secure.
“We believe that online voting, especially online voting in large scale, introduces great risk into the election system by threatening voters’ expectations of confidentiality, accountability and security of their votes and provides an avenue for malicious actors to manipulate the voting results,” said Neil Jenkins, an official in the department’s Office of Cybersecurity and Communications.
Private-sector researchers are also concerned about potential meddling by Russians in the U.S. election system. Rich Barger, chief information officer at ThreatConnect, said that several of the IP addresses listed in the FBI alert trace back to a website-hosting service called King Servers that offers Russia-based technical support. Barger also said that one of the methods used was similar to a tactic employed in other intrusions suspected of being carried out by the Russian government, including one this month on the World Anti-Doping Agency.
“The very fact that [someone] has rattled the doorknobs, the very fact that the state election commissions are in the crosshairs, gives grounds to the average American voter to wonder: Can they really trust the results?” Barger said.
Earlier this month, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson held a conference call with state elections officials, offering his assistance in protecting against cyberattacks.
Johnson said that DHS was “not aware of any specific or credible cybersecurity threats relating to the upcoming general election systems,” according to a readout of the call.
It was not clear whether he was aware at the time of the FBI’s investigations in Arizona and Illinois.
Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump
More than 30 states offer online voting, but experts warn it isn’t secure.
Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
According to the report, intelligence officials identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with hacked emails and other documents that were damaging to the Democratic Party and its presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.
In October, US intelligence officials formally accused Russia of hacking the Democratic Party after a series of cyberattacks against the organization.
While the US initially thought Russia was trying to sew doubt in the US electoral process, intelligence officials now say Russia's apparent goal was to elect Trump.
President Barack Obama ordered a "full review" of Russia's alleged involvement, due before Trump's inauguration on January 20.
Trump has repeatedly dismissed the possibility of Russia's involvement in the election.
In an interview with Time published this week, Trump said the previous hacks could have been caused by Russia, or China, or "some 400 pound guy in his home in New Jersey." Chris Cristie has denied any involvement.
The CIA believes that Russia intentionally meddled in the US election specifically to help Donald Trump win.
That allegation was revealed in a secret CIA presentation that was given to lawmakers, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported on Friday night.
Intelligence officials believe they have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who allegedly gave WikiLeaks thousands of hacked emails and other documents, The Post wrote.
During the election, WikiLeaks regularly published hacked documents that were damaging to Democratic Party organizations and its presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton. The email dump reached a fever pitch in the final weeks of the election.
WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange, has denied his organization played any role in Russia's alleged meddling.
The Trump transition team released a remarkable statement Friday casting doubt on the reported findings.
"These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction," the statement said. "The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and 'Make America Great Again.'"
In private meetings last week, the CIA told senators the evidence they gathered demonstrates it is "quite clear" Russia aimed to help ensure a Trump victory.
Initially, the inclination within the US intelligence community was that Russia simply sought to undermine the integrity of the election. That assertion was bolstered by concerns that the Kremlin might attempt to hack voting machines on Election Day.
But, as The Post's Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller wrote, official findings have led US intelligence experts to believe Russia was aiming for a specific result — a President-elect Donald Trump.
"It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected," said an unnamed senior US official who was briefed on the matter and cited by The Post.
The New York Times cited a senior Obama administration official who said "We now have high confidence that they hacked the DNC and the RNC, and conspicuously released no documents" related to Republicans.
In addition to the release of hacked emails, a flood of disinformation and conspiracy theories was widely circulated on the internet in the form of false stories that were peddled as news. Much of that fake news — which almost exclusively targeted Hillary Clinton — gained tremendous popularity on social networks like Facebook for months leading up to November 8.
News of the CIA’s findings came as President Barack Obama ordered a complete review of the matter Friday.
In October, the Department of Homeland Security and Office of the Director of National Intelligence officially accused Russia of hacking the Democratic Party citing multiple cyberattacks against the organization.
US intelligence officials have previously been cautious about accusing Russia of helping Trump win the election as they have faced challenges gathering intelligence about President Vladimir Putin, The Post reported.
Democrats have criticized the Obama administration's extremely cautious approach to pointing fingers at Russia.
According to the report, when the Obama administration tried to form a bipartisan coalition that would publicly accuse Russia of undermining the election, their plan was met with opposition from skeptical Republicans.
The Post noted that California Rep. Devin Nunes, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and is a member of the Trump transition team, said he would "be the first one to come out and point at Russia if there’s clear evidence, but there is no clear evidence."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell implied he would accuse Obama of partisan politics if Obama publicly challenged Russia.
With Russia Probe, Obama Finally Hacks the Hearts of Defense Hawks
As one of his last acts in office, President Obama will do something he’s rarely done: please Republicans.
The president’s decision to ask American intelligence agencies for a report on the hacking attacks connected to the presidential election—in particular, what impact Russian agents may have had on the election results—was cheered by hawkish Republicans and neoconservative foreign policy experts who have found hardly any common ground with the Obama White House over the past eight years.
“It appears... that after eight years the administration has suddenly awoken to the threat,” said Rep. Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "Russia’s cyber-attacks are no surprise to the House Intelligence Committee, which has been closely monitoring Russia’s belligerence for years.
"All I can say is that this a very good but overdue move," added Eliot Cohen, who served as the State Department under Condoleeza Rice.
The report will be delivered to Congress before Obama’s term is complete, potentially putting President-elect Donald Trump at odds with members of his own party on the eve of his inauguration.
Trump has dismissed the role Russian agents have had in the presidential election—during one debate he guessed that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s emails could have been "somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.” However, the intelligence community has assessed that Russia was responsible for the email breaches at the DNC and with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s personal emails.
“Russia is clearly the issue on which Trump diverges the most from the rest of the GOP,” said Dan Drezner, a hawkish foreign policy intellectual who teaches at Tufts University.
In fact, while there are few issues on which both parties agree, there is wide bipartisan agreement on the issue of Russian belligerence. Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain have announced their intention to begin investigations into Russia, while House Democrats have crafted legislation that would create an independent commission to report on Russian interference in the American election, similar in concept to the 9/11 Commission.
"After many briefings by our intelligence community, it is clear to me that the Russians hacked our democratic institutions and sought to interfere in our elections and sow discord,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, saying he was “pleased” to hear of the White House’s announced investigation, urging that they declassify as much of it as possible.
Still, even while Republicans generally agreed with the president’s decision to request a report on Russian meddling in the U.S. elections, some on the right wondered what took so long for him to respond to Russian aggression—and only after an election loss.
“Years enabling Putin, Kerry shining [Russian Foreign Minister] Lavrov’s shoes, and NOW he’s upset?” American Enterprise Institute senior vice president Danielle Pletka told The Daily Beast. “This is blatantly political. It’s not that Russia didn’t seek to interfere, it’s that while they were doing so, not to speak of their activities in Europe and in Syria, Obama was indifferent.”
“The Obama administration, dedicated to delusions of ‘resetting’ relations with Russia, ignored pleas by numerous Intelligence Committee members to take more forceful action against the Kremlin’s aggression,” Nunes said.
In fact, in one of the ironies of the 2016 presidential election, the Obama administration originally sought to ‘reset’ relations with Russia, a strategy in which Hillary Clinton was a key player.
The American attempts to form closer ties with Russia were ultimately unsuccessful—Russia would go on to annex Crimea and support unrest in Ukraine—and the Eurasian nation ultimately played a key role against Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. But before Trump enters office, Obama is trying allow lawmakers—and perhaps the public—to understand just how hard the Russians tried to manipulate the American electorate.
“I think he has certainly succeeded in introducing additional discord into our political system,” said Rep. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “And he’s endeavored to weaken Secretary Clinton so if she is successful in the election she is a less formidable foe.”
Schiff, who has been briefed on the hacks by U.S. intelligence officials, said the intelligence community views the Russian campaign “with great alarm.” In part that’s because interference with the presidential election is not a singular event. Rather, it fits in a pattern of increasingly bold moves by Russia to challenge U.S. influence and to enhance Putin’s standing with his own people.
“I think the shift began well before this [hacking] with Putin’s rising hostility, with the invasion of Ukraine, with their conduct in Syria,” Schiff said. “This is just the latest form of Russian aggression against the U.S. and our interests.” And, he added, there’s no reason to think it will cease after Election Day.
U.S. intelligence analysts have also closely watched Russia’s propaganda campaigns in Europe. Those efforts, which preceded the U.S. hacking operation and were also aimed at undermining elections, propagated false information about national leaders and eroded public support for the European Union. Last summer, a senior E.U. official said that Russian propaganda websites and social media trolling had been documented in every European country. Hundreds of “disinformation websites” had been spotted in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The EU now has a task force dedicated to debunking conspiracy theories and fake news stories being churned out by Moscow.
“We’re seeing a troubling escalation of that kind of conduct here in the United States,” Schiff said.
Why Putin decided that last summer was the moment to extend so-called “active measures” into the United States is a matter of significant discussion inside the U.S. intelligence community. But his confidence in his own political longevity was badly shaken, observers say, by protests in Moscow in 2011 and later the overthrow of a pro-Russian government in Ukraine. Putin sees the United States as the secret architect of these movements, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper explained at a security conference in Aspen, Colorado, last summer.
“I think that their approach is they believe that we are trying to influence political developments in Russia, we are trying to effect change, and so their natural responses is to retaliate and do onto us as they think we’ve done onto them,” Clapper said.
Schiff said that the hacks, which the intelligence community officially pinned on the highest levels of the Russian government in October, can be seen as “payback” for Putin’s erroneous conclusions that the Obama administration is responsible for his political troubles. To strengthen the legitimacy of his own rule, Putin routinely seeks to expose corruption and unfairness in U.S. and European politics and to accuse his adversaries of behaving no differently than him. The leaked emails from the DNC and later inside Clinton’s own campaign gave him powerful ammunition—showing that the DNC and its leadership were working hard to undermine Clinton’s Democratic rivals, and passing supposedly confidential information to her campaign.
“There’s a domestic portion to Putin’s agenda here,” Peter Clement, a deputy assistant director at the CIA and the agency’s most senior Russia analyst, said in rare public remarks at a conference in Washington, DC, in September. “If you look at the leaks that came out most recently on the DNC, the Russian media were very, very quick to pick up the fact that, ‘See, the West is always lecturing us, and yet look at this primary system. Was it a truly level playing field?’ Which is something the Americans always criticize the Russians about.”
Clement said that Russian press also seized on documents hacked from the World Anti-Doping Agency that showed American athletes taking banned substances after Russian athletes were thrown out of competition for their own drug use. (Some well-known American athletes received permission from the agency to take drugs for common ailments.) The revelations were another opportunity for Putin to expose what he sees as the West’s hypocrisy and to try to normalize Russia’s behavior on the international stage.
“If you watch the Russian media closely, these themes come through loud and clear,” Clement said. “I think Putin sees this as a way of trying to legitimize to his own people, ‘You know, we’re not any different than anybody else. Everybody does the things that they accuse us of doing, and at least we have stability and order at home.’”
But in targeting the U.S. elections, Putin is also playing to American voters.
I suspect Putin wanted the hacking and leaking to be just ambiguous enough to be deniable, but obvious enough to make a point: we can do this, we have done this, we don’t fear you.
It’s classic Putin, jerk geopolitics, trying to win the initiative by some alpha-male stunt, the cyber equivalent of bringing his big dog into meetings with [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel, who is notoriously afraid of dogs.”
If Putin’s M.O. is to intimidate world leaders, in the U.S. campaign, he flipped that approach—talking up a candidate instead. “What facilitated this, I have to say, and made it more successful, is that one of the presidential candidates decided to be an enabler,” Schiff said.
Trump has publicly praised Putin as a wise and strong leader, encouraged Russian hackers to expose more of Clinton’s emails, and consistently denied that Russia is responsible for the hacking campaign, despite the consensus of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies to the contrary.
“This was a tremendous boon to the Kremlin because they could publicize on RT [the English-language Russian TV network] and back home that one of the major candidates believes Russia had nothing to do with this,” Schiff said. “It gave credibility to their deniability.”
Writing in the Washington Post on Friday, former CIA Director Michael Hayden said that Trump was playing the old Soviet role of the “useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”
Clinton has seized on this idea, too, and practically made Trump’s suspected links to Putin part of her stump speech. Her campaign has said that the hacks were designed specifically to boost Trump’s chances of winning—an assertion that not even the intelligence community has made. Her campaign publicized a widely criticized article that suggested Trump’s company had a secret line of communication to a Russian bank. And in the third presidential debate, Clinton called Trump a “puppet” of the Russian president.
While there is clearly a Clinton strategy to discredit Trump as a Kremlin stooge, that also may play into Putin’s hands.
“Calling Trump Putin’s puppet is a sign of the weakness of the American political system,” said Fiona Hill, who served as the national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council.
“It appears so weak and fragile that outsiders can actually meddle about in it. That’s a win because he wants to say U.S. politics is terrible. He’s always trying to take a stab against U.S. exceptionalism,” said Hill, who’s now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of the book Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.
The very thing that Putin wants, to loom large in his adversaries’ imagination and their conversations, is what he got this election season. “I was cringing every time Putin was mentioned in debates,” Hill said.
The omnipresence of Putin in the campaign has also demonstrated, both to a Russian and American audience, that Russia cannot be dismissed after the votes for president are counted.
“How can it be a regional power if it was the central topic of the third debate?” Sergei Markov, who runs a pro-Kremlin think tank, told Foreign Policy columnist Julia Ioffe.
Not everyone is equally impressed with the success of Russia’s active measures campaign. In seeking to disrupt the American elections, Putin may not have thought ahead to what comes next.
“In the short term, Putin has certainly achieved what he set out to do, primarily in creating problems for Clinton,” Galeotti said. “But as ever I feel Putin misunderstands and under-estimates democratic systems, and did not think through the longer-term implications.”
“Assuming Clinton wins,” Galeotti continued, “she is likely to be a far more hostile president than before, closer to the Clinton Putin imagined. Even if Trump wins, the national security establishment in DC with which he will have to work is certainly now convinced that the Putin regime is a clear and present danger not just to the international order but America’s democratic system.”
There’s no sign that the Russians will end their active measures campaign with the election on Tuesday. Indeed, they have plenty of incentives to continue. A President Clinton would enter office politically weakened by the Russian leaks as well as ongoing disclosures about her use of a private email system. And a President Trump could easily find himself on the receiving end of a Russian propaganda campaign should he turn on Putin.
The White House has promised that the U.S. will respond to the Russian hacks, though it’s not year clear what form that retaliation might take. Sanctions? Leaks of Russian government communications? A cyber attack on Russian computer systems?
Officials have said that any U.S. response will likely wait until after the election. Presuming Clinton is the victor, it will fall to her to help craft and ultimately enforce a strategy to deter Russian aggression in the future.
“Unless they pay an increasingly high price for this, they’ll continue to meddle the way they are,” Schiff said.
The headline: “U.S. investigates potential covert Russian plan to disrupt November elections.” To those unused to this kind of story, I can imagine that headline, from The Post this week, seemed strange. A secret Russian plot to throw a U.S. election through a massive hack of the electoral system? It sounds like a thriller, or a movie starring Harrison Ford.
In fact, the scenario under investigation has already taken place, in whole or in part, in other countries. Quite a bit of the story is already unfolding in public; strictly speaking, it’s not “secret” or “covert” at all. But because most Americans haven’t seen this kind of game played before (most Americans, quite wisely, don’t follow political news from Central Europe or Ukraine), I think the scenario needs to be fully spelled out. And so, based on Russia’s past tactics in other countries, assuming it acts more or less the same way it acts elsewhere, here’s what could happen over the next two months:
1. Donald Trump, who is advised by several people with Russian links, will repeat and strengthen his “the election is rigged” narrative. The “polls are lying,” the “real” people aren’t being counted, the corrupt elites/Clinton clan/mainstream media are colluding to prevent him from taking office. Trump will continue to associate himself with Brexit — a vote that pollsters really did get wrong — and with Nigel Farage, the far-right British politician who now promotes Trump (and has, incidentally, just been offered his own show on RT, the Russian state-sponsored TV channel).
2. Russia will continue to distribute and publish the material its hackers have already obtained from attacks on the Democratic National Committee, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, former NATO supreme commander Gen. Philip Breedlove and probably others. The point will be to discredit not just Hillary Clinton but also the U.S. democratic process and, again, the “elite” who supposedly run it. As we have learned in multiple countries, even benign private conversations and emails can, when published in a newspaper, look sinister. Speculation seems ominous; jokes menacing. Almost any leak of anything is damaging.
3. On or before Election Day, Russian hackers will seek to break into the U.S. voting system. We certainly know that this is possible: Hackers have already targeted voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona, according to The Post, and the FBI has informed Arizona officials that it suspects Russian hacking teams. Possible breaches are being investigated in several other states, and it’s not hard to imagine that many are vulnerable. The U.S. election system is decentralized and in some places frankly amateurish, as we learned in Florida in 2000.
4. The Russians attempt to throw the election. They might try to get Trump elected. Alternatively — and this would, of course, be even more devastating — they might try to rig the election for Clinton, perhaps leaving a trail of evidence designed to connect the rigging operation to Clinton’s campaign.
5. Once revealed, the result will be media hysteria, hearings, legal challenges, mass rallies, a constitutional crisis — followed by confusion, chaos and an undermining of the office of the presidency. Trump might emerge from the process as president after all. He will then go on, as promised at so many rallies, to “lock her up,” and of course to open a broad relation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the only foreign leader he seems to truly admire. Even if Clinton remains as president, she will be tarnished. At least a part of the country will assume she is illegitimate, that the elites/Clinton clan/mainstream media stole the election from “the people.”
6. More likely, the hack will fail, or never even get off the ground. But what’s the downside in trying, or even in letting it be known that it was tried? Rumors of election fraud can create the same hysteria as real election fraud. Already, Russia’s propaganda wire service, sputniknews.com, has speculated that The Post’s article on Russian electoral manipulation is a clever plot “to hide the actual efforts at electoral manipulation” and a “good cover for vote-rigging.” That thought will be tweeted and posted and shared by a whole ecosystem of professional trolls and computer bots, over and over again until it finally shows up on authentic pro-Trump websites.
7. And what’s the downside for Trump? If he wins, he wins. If he loses — then there are all kinds of ways to make money from the “election was rigged” narrative. He could start a media company focused on the conspiracy. He could start a national movement. He could make movies. He could be a hero. Whatever happens, the political process is undermined, social trust plummets further and the appeal of U.S. democracy, both at home and around the world, diminishes. And that, of course, is the point.
The Real Don
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