Russia is exploiting American white supremacy; U.S. voting systems have “staggering” vulnerabilities; latest Russian hacking indictment, and more

“I think everyone is expecting the 2016 shock and awe,” said Robert Johnston, CEO of Adlumin. “They needed that level of action in 2016 to achieve their objective. They don’t need that today. Today is a much different America than 2016.” Now Russia need only “stoke the fire, provide oxygen every day, every quarter every month” whether it’s an election year or not.
Johnston led the forensic investigation into the DNC breach in 2016 while working at Crowdstrike. In an interview with The Daily Beast he said it’s a mistake to look for the same splashy techniques in the midterms, particularly when Russia has problems in its own neighborhood.  “They’re always focused in the Caucasus, the Baltics, and Europe,” said Johnston. “Putin views the United States as something to be dealt with, but Europe as the threat. So they’re always going to be focused there.”
Johnston says that since 2016 the GRU’s hackers have mostly gone back to their roots, conducting spying operations, and primarily focusing on Russia’s side of the Atlantic.  Other hacker-trackers agree. “They haven’t gone away, but they have returned to the type of low-key espionage attacks we observed prior to 2016,” said Dick O’Brien, a manager in the security response team at Symantec. O’Brien said Symantec has been tracking the hackers—which it calls APT28—in attacks against military and civilian government offices in Europe and South America. “The overall activity level has dropped somewhat from what we saw prior to 2016.”
Of course, nobody is sounding the all-clear on the midterm election. Russia has an arsenal of disruption capabilities—previously deployed against Ukraine—that the Kremlin could conceivably train on the U.S. in an attempt to sow havoc on election day. “The idea that they could stage municipal attacks to interfere with people getting to the polls in certain areas, messing with electricity, or traffic lights, or mass transit, those are all things that we think that they tried when attempting to influence recent European elections,” said attorney Christopher Ott, a former Justice Department prosecutor who worked on the DNC hack prior to Mueller’s appointment.
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According to a former senior U.S. cybersecurity official, the Kremlin enjoyed such runaway success in 2016—encouraging American political chaos and helping elect Donald Trump—that substantial interference in the midterm elections isn’t necessary. Instead, the Russians can focus on other targets, such as influencing the European parliamentary elections in the spring of 2019.
“They’re going to adjust their tradecraft and figure out other ways to weigh in without being so obviously Russian as to generate antibodies to their interference,” said Andrew Grotto, who oversaw cybersecurity issues for both Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s National Security Councils.
Grotto said that Russian hacking related to the congressional elections carried the risk of jeopardizing whatever they might be planning for Europe next spring. “That always has costs in terms of exposing their tradecraft,” Grotto told The Daily Beast.
The Internet Research Agency, Russia’s troll farm, was never a clandestine organization and isn’t as affected by exposure. But post-election crackdowns at Facebook and Twitter cost the IRA thousands of fake accounts, including a number of high-profile cover identities with large followings, and some personas that enjoyed retweet love by Trump’s family and advisors or were quoted in the press.
Today the troll factory is using a mix of surviving accounts and new ones to do what it’s always done, spread fake news and fan division on Twitter, said Ryan Fox, a former NSA official now serving as COO of the smear-fighting startup New Knowledge. It’s also sneaking back onto Facebook, which discovered and deleted a fresh batch of fraudulent IRA-linked profiles and group pages in July. So far, though, none of the accounts are doing anything special for the election.  “Lately, it’s been Kavanaugh all day, all the time,” said Fox.
“My assessment of the situation is they’re having to reconstitute. I also would assume that because most of their accounts were taken down that they don’t have the same robustness available,” Fox said.The indicted Russian businessman who funded the IRA is now pouring resources into a new venture called USA Really, a Russian site dedicated to pushing anti-American propaganda. Unlike the IRA’s deceptive websites and Facebook groups, USA Really doesn’t disguise itself as a domestic U.S. entity, and it has real people on its masthead. In the short term, that makes it less effective at influencing Americans, but it also makes the site harder to target with a rational social media policy. Fox thinks that model is the future of Russia’s information operations.  “They’re out in the open now,” said Fox. “You can’t just call them out as Russian bots. You have to get into a debate about who counts as a journalist.”
Fox agrees with Grotto there may be careful thinking behind Russia’s comparatively low-key approach in 2018.
“Strategically, are they content with the way things are? Does it play in their favor to do anything right now? That’s a valid question,” Fox said. “Keep up the momentum, keep poking away. But do they have to implement drastic measures like hacking the DNC and exposing thousands of emails? Probably not.”
It’s the simplest theory, and perhaps the most compelling. Putin examined the state of American discourse and politics in 2018, and decided that, for now at least, his work here is done.

Russia is winning the information war in Iraq and Syria: U.K. general (Katie Bo Williams, Defense One)
Moscow is “better than us” in using social media to shape the strategic landscape, says a former deputy commander of the West’s anti-ISIS coalition.

Going on the offensive: A U.S. strategy to combat Russian information warfare (Seth Jones, CSIS)
Moscow continues to wage an offensive information campaign designed, in the words of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, to “weaken and divide the United States.” But Washington has been reactive, slow to respond, and focused on defensive measures. The United States needs to adopt a proactive, offensive campaign to coerce Russia to curb its information warfare efforts, punish Moscow when further incidents occur, and exploit Russian weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The Reagan administration’s strategy and actions offer a useful template.

Takeaways from the latest Russian hacking indictment (Megan Reiss, Lawfare)
The Justice Department announced on Oct. 5 the indictment of seven officers of the Russian Military Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, on charges of computer hacking, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Here are three quick takeaways.

U.S. voting systems have “staggering” vulnerabilities: Cyber researchers (Joseph Marks, Defense One)
The report from DEF CON’s Voting Village found one bug that alone could flip the Electoral College. Another has gone unfixed for 11 years.

Mueller defends authority, hearkens back to Garfield administration (Darren Samuelsohn, Politico)
Special counsel Robert Mueller cited more than a century’s worth of presidential scandal on Friday as part of a sweeping legal defense of his own authorities. The lead Russia prosecutor made the historical references — that attorney generals have needed special investigators dating back to the 1870s — in a legal brief to a federal appeals court considering the case of a reluctant witness tied to a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump who is seeking to have Mueller’s appointment thrown out on constitutional grounds.

Ken Starr: Trump’s defense team should be “very concerned” (Edward-Isaac Dovere, Politico)
The former Whitewater prosecutor says that he understands Trump’s reluctance to cooperate with Mueller, but believes that the president has an obligation to do so.
“If I’m on his criminal defense team, I would be very concerned,” Starr. “I don’t know what President Trump knows, but there have been a number of guilty pleas. Some of those guilty pleas go to false statements, so I would just be cautious” before answering questions from Mueller.
Starr says he’d advise this even while he believes that Trump has a duty to answer investigators’ questions under oath, just as Clinton did 20 years ago. “He is the president of the United States, and I think that carries with it an obligation to cooperate with duly-authorized federal investigations,” Starr said.
“You’re not above the law. You think you’ve got a timeout based upon your service as president. We respect you, you are occupying the presidency, you have a very important job,” Starr said. “But there’s no timeout. You have to respond when you’re summoned to the bar of justice. That’s the way I respond to all this. You have to be a rule of law person if you’re going to occupy a position of trust.”

‘Can you do this?’: Russia probe conflicts rampant among Rosenstein replacements (Darren Samuelsohn and John Gerstein, Politico)
No matter which way the president looks, he’ll have trouble finding the right fit.
President Donald Trump may think he’s getting rid of a problem if he pushes Rod Rosenstein out of the Justice Department.
But cleaning house at DOJ will hardly end the president’s headaches from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election meddling and whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Moscow on its efforts.
Several Trump administration appointees in line for Rosenstein’s role overseeing Mueller’s probe come with their own baggage, from direct involvement in the probe to recent work at law firms with clients mired in the investigation.

New boss for Italian state TV is old fan of fake news (Coda Story)
No, this is not fake news. The man just appointed to run Italy’s state broadcaster, therefore overseeing its daily news output, has a history of sharing fake news on social media.
Marcello Foa, who is about to take the controls of Italy’s Rai network, has also been a regular contributor to Kremlin-backed media outlets, and is on record as an admirer of both Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump’s rabble-rousing former aide Steve Bannon.
Previously a journalist on a newspaper owned by former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, Foa helped spread a story about Hillary Clinton attending a “Satanic Dinner” during the 2016 election campaign, and also has a history of spreading anti-vaccine and anti-Muslim conspiracies.
He has frequently worked with the Kremlin-funded RT and Sputnik, opposes the European Union, and once said that being gay is “abnormal.”
But his views seem to be in accordance with opinions of other representatives of the current Italian populist government, as Coda recently reported.

Skripal poisoning: Reporter behind Salisbury exposé flees Russia (Marc Bennetts, Times)
One of the journalists claiming to have unmasked the true identity of a suspect in the Salisbury poisonings has fled Russia, fearing that security service officials are planning to accuse him of involvement in a plot to assassinate President Putin.
Sergei Kanev works for The Insider, an opposition website that co-authored the report last week naming Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga as one of the two alleged Russian intelligence agents who travelled to Britain in March to try to murder Sergei Skripal, a former double agent, with novichok.

Feds freeze Russian oligarch’s assets, Upper East Side mansion (Jennifer Gould Keil, New York Post)
A sprawling mansion on the Upper East Side has been frozen as part of a hard-core battle between the U.S. government and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, The Post has learned. U.S. officials say Deripaska, an aluminum billionaire, is close both with Russian mob leaders and Russian president Vladimir Putin — and that he is on the sanctions list because he is allegedly involved in murder, money-laundering, bribery and racketeering.

Trump team’s contact with Mueller targets could taint findings (Darren Samuelsohn, Politico)
Legal experts say the president’s lawyers may be pushing ethical boundaries by communicating with people involved in the Mueller probe.