Brian Burt's Blog: Work in Progress - Posts Tagged "hacking"

For my day job, I work in cybersecurity. To people in my line of work, the "revelation" that Russia engaged in a systematic (and highly effective) disinformation campaign on social media to influence the U.S. Presidential election isn't a controversial assertion. To most expert sources in my industry, it's more of a "d'uh" moment, as in: "we've been warning you about this for years, and now you're surprised by this?"

News flash, folks: this isn't shocking or unforeseen. The Russians have been refining their craft and figuring out how best to hack elections (usually by targeting voters, not voting systems) for a long time. Here are few historic examples:

Ukraine election narrowly avoided 'wanton destruction' from hackers

The Dutch just showed the world how Russia influences Western European elections

And, of course, the threat doesn't end now that the U.S. election is over. There are signs, and growing concerns, that Russia intends to repeat the cyber-playbook that proved so successful in the U.S. to target upcoming elections in France, Germany, and the Netherlands: Europe ready for CYBERWAR over fears Russia will hack Germany, France and Netherlands vote.

So President-elect Trump and his transition team can repeat their claims that "nobody knows" who hacked the DNC and John Pedesta, feeding embarrassing emails via Wikileaks steadily throughout the home stretch of the Presidential campaign. Sure, our entire national intelligence apparatus has concluded with extremely high confidence that the Russians were behind this, and the fake news onslaught on social media, but they've been wrong before, most notably about WMD's in Iraq. Truth be told, though, they're more often right than wrong... and they're not alone in their conclusions. Most security experts worldwide agree with them. Even staunch Republican political fixtures like Senator John McCain don't doubt Russia's election hacking in the least and believe it's a dire threat both at home and abroad: McCain: Russian election-related hacks threaten to 'destroy democracy'.

I'm not for a moment implying that the recent U.S. Presidential election result should be invalidated or that the electoral college should delay its "official vote." The election is over. We have a new administration forming. Any attempt to disrupt the transition just increases the level of chaos and gives Russia an even bigger victory than they've already achieved.

But President Trump, his cabinet, and the U.S. Congress better not ignore the reports from the intelligence community. They better take the Russian hacking threat seriously, investigate it thoroughly, learn important lessons from it, and implement programs to mitigate the risk of a repetition in the future. Because cyber-warfare (even if it's "cyber-psyops") is a reality. Cyberspace is indeed a real theater of operations for nation-states and their militaries. And people's perceptions are much easier to hack than electronic voting systems or DoD networks.

We science fiction writers and readers are predisposed to accept the new reality. We've had decades of brilliant stories like William Gibson's immortal Neuromancer to prepare us. Still, some of our less tech-savvy brethren may struggle to understand just how dangerous disinformation can be in an information-driven, networked world. Let's hope and pray that our national (and global) leaders don't hide from yet another inconvenient truth.

#SFWApro