Russia & U.S. electionsU.S. readies retaliation if Russian disrupts Election Day

Russian government hackers working for the FSB (the Russian domestic security service) and the GRU (Russian military intelligence) have used their considerable cyber-skills to interfere in the political process leading up to the 8 November elections. The immediate goal of the Russian cyber campaign has been to undermine the campaign of Hillary Clinton in an effort to help Donald Trump win. The more strategic goal has been to undermine U.S. political institutions, sow confusion and doubt about the integrity of political processes, and provide “proof” for the conspiratorial assertions about a “rigged” election system in which “international bankers” collude with the “establishment” and Clinton to “steal” the election and subvert the will of the American people.

The U.S. government publicly accused the Russian government of being behind the broad effort to undermine the elections – and issued a stern warning in private that any attempt by Russia to use cyberattacks to change actual vote tallies would carry serious consequences.

NBC News reports that in preparation for an American retaliation in the event Russia does go ahead trying to change the counting of actual votes on election day, U.S. government cyber operatives have “penetrated” Russia’s telecommunications networks and electric grid. The penetration, and the sleeper malware left behind, would allow the United States to hit back in case Russian intelligence agencies do carry out a cyberattack on U.S. election systems on Tuesday.

An anonymous senior intelligence official told NBC News that the United States would launch a cyberattack on Russia’s infrastructure only “if necessary.”

Cyberexperts – and Edward Snowden – have noted that it is not exactly a secret that the United States has been infiltrating the critical infrastructure systems of other countries – Russia, China, Iran – as part of a broader strategy of preparation for a future cyberwar.

The United States and Israel, for example, collaborated in 2009-2010 in using a piece of malware called Stuxnet to destroy or disrupt thousands of Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges, thus slowing down Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

The Independent reports that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are anxious about Russian government hackers could disrupt Tuesday elections by releasing fake documents, creating bogus social media profiles to spread misinformation online about rigged counting, removing the names of thousands of voters from digital voter rolls, tampering with state voting registration systems, and more.

Cyberexperts noted that “Guccifer 2.0” — a front for Russian intelligence — tweeted Friday that it would monitor the U.S. elections “from inside the system.”

DHS officials briefed reporters on Friday, saying they were “very concerned” about hacker-caused confusion on election day, but that they were confident that no breach would influence the result of the election.

Representative Adam Schiff (D-California), the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, told told CNN: “They are capable of doing damage, they are capable of sowing further disarray. 

“Will they end up doing it? We don’t know, and I think we are taking all the precautions that we can.”

The DHS has all fifty states help in conducting “cyberhygiene scans” – but only forty-six accepted the offer.

“The question remains whether the federal government will subvert the Constitution to achieve the goal of federalizing elections under the guise of security,” Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told technology blog Nextgov.

DHS and other government agencies have also readied “incident response teams” to be deployed wherever there might be a cybersecurity incident on Tuesday.

The Russian government appears to have gone beyond instructing its hackers to steal e-mails and documents from the computer systes of the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign.

Two senior DNC officials told Mother Jones that a security sweep in late October found evidence — a radio signal near the DNC chairman’s office – which suggests that the DNC headquarters in Washington, D.C. had been “bugged.” The FBI investigated, but could not find any bugging devices on the premises.

Adm. Mike Rogers, the head of the NSA, told Congress in 2014 that foreign adversaries were breaching the U.S. cyber systems in order to glean information and potentially gain control over U.S. critical infrastructure systems, from chemical facilities to water treatment plants to power plants.

The United States has followed a similar path – and it is some of these cyber-capabilities that the United States may activate to retaliate against Russia if Russia tried to change the elections outcome.