Russia’s broad cyber campaign to undermine Western democracies

Dov Levin, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University who studied outside interferences in elections, told USA Today that the most common Soviet and Russian tactics are “dirty tricks — attempts to harm in some way the side they don’t want to win.”

This was precisely what the representatives of Vladimir Putin gave as a reason when they contacted Donald Trump Jr. about putting together the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower between Russian agents and Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner: The Russians told Trump Jr. that they would provide “dirt” on Hillary Clinton as a way to help Trump win the election.

Michael Flynn Jr. lost his security clearance – and his future position under his father at the NSC – when he re-tweeted to his Twitter followers the fake Russian story about Hillary Clinton running a pedophile network out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria.

Ben Nimmo, an analyst at the Atlantic Council’s DFR Labs, which tracks Russian propaganda, told USA Today that Russian tactics mirror those used by the Soviet Union against its own people.

The Soviets used “massacres, the gulag prison system and the KGB intelligence service to intimidate and eliminate potential opponents inside the Soviet Union and outside its borders,” he said. “That is the system Putin came out of.”

The key takeaways from the Alliance’s report:

— In 2013, Russian General of the Army Valery Gerasimov published “The Value of Science in Prediction.” Gerasimov argued that in the future wars will be fought with a one-to-four ratio of military to non-military methods. Less than four years later, the U.S. intelligence community issued a historic joint assessment of Russian interference in the election.

— As a declining power, Russia is seeking to gain relative strength on the world stage by weakening other states through cheap, asymmetric tools. Using a combination of both overt and covert means, Russia is — at this moment — working to influence democracies around the world. Russia believes that their meddling in the U.S. 2016 election was a success and is sure to try it again in the future. This is a completely new foreign policy challenge, and it requires a varied response from a broad range of sectors.

— One of the greatest strengths of the United States and other western nations is their democracy, Lora Rosenberger notes, and Russia is seeking to exploit this system by sowing chaos through disinformation, cyber-attacks on political figures and institutions, assaults on the voting process, targeting of critical infrastructure, support for extremist parties and fringe views, and state economic coercion.

— Among the examples of Russian meddling cited by Alliance are:

— 5 April 2004: Prime Minister Rolandas Paksas of Lithuania, a former Soviet republic, was impeached for granting citizenship to alleged Russian crime figure Yuri Borisov and leaking him classified information that he was under investigation. Borisov contributed $400,000 to Paksas’ 2003 election campaign, presumably with the Kremlin’s blessing.

— 27 April 2007: Estonia, another former Soviet republic, accused hackers using Russian IP addresses of a wide-scale denial of service attack that shut down the Internet in Estonia, one of NATO’s newest members. The attack on the government, newspaper and banking websites appeared to be a response to Estonian authorities’ decision to move a Soviet World War II memorial known as the Bronze Soldier from a central square in Tallinn, the Baltic nation’s capital. Russia denied the accusation.

— 7 August 2008: Cyberattacks conducted from Russia brought Internet traffic to a halt in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, while Russian troops invaded Georgian territory.

— January 2013: Spain’s Civil Guard unraveled a Russian mafia network accused of laundering large sums of money through Banco Madrid.

— 17 September 2014: Russian “election observers” from the Russian Public Institute of Electoral Law cast doubt on the validity of the Scottish referendum on independence from the United Kingdom a day before the vote.

— 22 July 2016: WikiLeaks published about 20,000 emails from the Democratic National Committee that U.S. intelligence and independent cybersecurity firms said were stolen by Russian government hackers a month earlier.

— 9 March 2017: Canada’s foreign minister was targeted in a Russian media campaign focusing on alleged Nazi links.

— Spring 2017: French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron was targeted by rumors about his sexual orientation and alleged corruption that were spread by far-right websites and relayed by Russian media. Macron was elected by a wide margin.

— Putin has no allegiance to any foreign political party, and the Alliance’s focus is to understand Putin’s toolkit and to develop a defensive and deterrent strategy to push back from a united front.

— Partisanship has limited the broader democratic debate and made it harder to deal with the problem of foreign influence in the democratic process. Jamie Fly states that many Republicans doubt Russia had anything to do with the U.S. 2016 general election. He says that even if Republicans did believe Russia played some role in the election, many are not willing to develop any measures to counteract Russia’s actions in the future.

— Jamie Fly fears that by 2018 or even 2020, there might still be a political debate in Congress and media about what actually occurred during the 2016 election with no action taken to prevent Russian interference from affecting the election again. The Alliance says it is working to combat this and lessen the impact of future Russian interference by making people more aware of where their information is coming from. It is important that leadership outside Washington, D.C. recognizes threats from Russia and engages with the Alliance.

— It is hard to get a sense of the scale of Russian influence. Putin acts through government officials but also through proxies such as contracted messaging and automated bots. With automation and artificial intelligence becoming cheaper and increasingly advanced, the potential for large-scale disinformation becomes more and more likely.

— In France’s most recent election, Emmanuel Macron’s campaign team actively pushed back against Russian interference efforts by setting up dummy accounts with provably fake data for Russia to hack. This greatly lessened the impact of future leaks.

— There is a general distrust between the government and the tech sector. Incentives for the public and private sectors in combatting Russian interference are misaligned. For example, about 20 percent of Twitter’s users are bots. Getting rid of those accounts would significantly decrease the corporation’s user base.

— The Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Disinformation Dashboard tracks 600 twitter accounts that have been core to the Russian amplification network. The biggest tool for combatting disinformation is promoting robust debate and educating people on how to identify reputable news sources. Suppressing dissent is not an effective solution and would be a grave mistake.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy is a bipartisan, transatlantic initiative housed at the German Marshall Fund (GMF), working to develop comprehensive strategies to defend against, deter, and raise the costs on Russian and other state actors’ efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions. “The Alliance will work to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe,” the Alliance says.

A new book by Russian journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan argues that Putin’s decision to work to ensure Trump’s victory in November 2016 stemmed from his anger at Hillary Clinton’s campaign to promote democracy in Russia and the former Soviet republics. In 2011, Putin charged that then-Secretary of State Clinton was behind large protests against his election, calling it an attack on Russian sovereignty. He also bitterly criticized U.S. democracy promotion campaigns abroad, and blamed Clinton for helping spark pro-Western political revolutions in the former Soviet republics of Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.

Putin became even more angry at the United States, which he blamed for the release of the Panama Papers in early 2016 – papers which document the secret financial transactions conducted by many in Putin’s inner circle.

Soldatov and Borogan say that these reasons were behind Putin’s orders to the GRU to launch a campaign to weaken Clinton, ensure Trump’s victory, and, more generally, undermine and discredit American democracy.

Their conclusions dovetail with the findings of the U.S. intelligence community.

U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement sources have expressed their dismay at the fact that President Trump has so far refused to be persuaded by the incontrovertible – and mounting – evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. The fourteen U.S. intelligence services have now assembled a complete picture – and timeline – of Russia’s campaign to ensure Trump’s election, but Trump keeps citing Putin’s denial of the Russian cyber effort as a reason why he – Trump — refuses to accept the unanimous conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community.

Cyber experts say that Trump’s refusal to accept the reality of the 2016 Russian government’s hacking and disinformation campaign is creating a dangerous policy vacuum. This vacuum, the security experts fear, is only encouraging more cyber warfare (see “Refusal to accept reality of Russian hacking hobbles U.S. cyber defense efforts: Experts,” HSNW, 27 July 2017)