The Plot to Hack America

“This is a big deal,” said Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer for ThreatConnect, a cybersecurity firm, on the FBI alert. “Two state election boards have been popped, and data has been taken. This certainly should be concerning to the common American voter.”^-270 Barger said one of the IP addresses listed in the FBI alert has surfaced before in Russian criminal underground hacker forums. He also compared the hacking methods to that of cyberattacks on the World Anti-Doping agency. The FBI told Yahoo! News that it intended “to help systems administrators guard against the actions of persistent cyber criminals.” Menzel, the Illinois election official, said the FBI was investigating a “possible link” to the other hacks. They drew no conclusions in the run-up to the election about the intent of the hack; some say it could just be common cyber criminals looking to steal data for fraud. However, the IPs of where the hackers registered their domains came from a shady company called IT Itch. It registers sites anonymously and is paid in Bitcoins, the currency of the internet underworld. This same company registered the COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR spear-phishing websites as well.⁵⁰

Even President Barack Obama weighed in on the possibility that Russia was behind the leak. The Associated Press wrote:

Asked whether Moscow was trying to influence the presidential election, Obama said, “Anything’s possible.” Obama, who traditionally avoids commenting on active FBI investigations, broke with that protocol and noted that outside experts have blamed Russia for the leak. He leaned heavily into the notion that President Vladimir Putin may have reason to facilitate the attack. “What the motives were in terms of the leaks, all that—I can’t say directly,” Obama told NBC News. “What I do know is that Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed admiration for Vladimir Putin.”⁵¹

Overall, the CYBER BEARs working in the guise of Guccifer 2.0 publically gave Trump and Clinton detractors illegally-obtained opposition research, without it being connected directly to Trump. As former FBI agent and security specialist Ali Soufan noted on twitter “The nature of breaches appears to be changing from covert info collection to the overt and weaponized use of that info.”⁵²

I Know Noth-Think!

On September 1, 2016 in a moment of rare candor and perhaps a bit of mischief, Vladimir Putin spoke about the nature and responsibility of the hacks against the United States: “But I want to tell you again, I don’t know anything about it, and on a state level Russia has never done this.” Putin then added, with a completely straight face, “Listen, does it even matter who hacked this data?… The important thing is the content that was given to the public.”

9 CYBERWAR TO DEFEND DEMOCRACY

“Always remember: cyber or kinetic, your adversaries prefer your silence, apathy and inaction. Be the consequence, not the victim.”

—Anthony Couchenour, Hoplite cyber security

THE 2016 ELECTION CYCLE IN THE United States will be noteworthy for more than just the bombastic rhetoric, the illogic, the lies, and the almost religious fervor of the electorate. The most important part of this election could easily be lost in the short-term memory of the American people, mainly because of the simplistic way our media makes us forget what is truly important.

Without any question, no matter what side of the aisle one sits on, the simple fact is that the United States was attacked by Russian cyber commandos deployed by Vladimir Putin and organized by his intelligence apparatus, the FSB and GRU. It was a serious act of political warfare.