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February 28 - March 16, 2024
The story was buried deep in the political pages.
the Russians had a larger plan.
Guccifer 2.0
it’s just a tiny part of all docs I downloaded from the Democrats’ networks,” he wrote, adding that the remainder, “thousands of files and mails,” were now in the hands of WikiLeaks. “They will publish them soon,” he predicted.
There was only one explanation for the purpose of releasing the DNC documents: to accelerate the discord between the Clinton camp and the Bernie Sanders camp, and to embarrass the Democratic leadership.
making selected stolen documents public was part of a larger plan, one that had been formulated months in advance.
The most politically potent of the emails made clear that the DNC leadership was doing whatever it could to make sure Hillary Clinton got the nomination and Bernie Sanders did not.
If the Russian goal was simply to trigger chaos, it worked. Wasserman Schultz, the Florida congresswoman, had to resign as the party’s chair just ahead of the convention over which she was set to preside.
The content of the leaks overwhelmed the bigger question of whether everyone—starting with the news organizations reporting the contents of the emails—was doing Putin’s bidding.
the intelligence agency’s paranoia about protecting sources and methods got in the way of warning the targets of the hacks—the election commissions in fifty states—that one of the world’s most cyber-savvy nations had them in its sights.
Reid would not offer the details of what he had been told, because they were classified, to his obvious frustration. But he did provide his takeaway: “Putin is trying to steal this election,” he told me. Ever the vote counter, he argued that if Russia concentrated on “less than six” swing states, it could alter the outcome.
“It devolved into a partisan debate,” Monaco later told me. “McConnell simply disbelieved what we were telling him.” He chastised the intelligence officials for buying into what he claimed was Obama administration spin, recalled one of the other senators present.
became clear that McConnell would not sign on to any statement blaming the Russians.
Kaspersky’s antivirus products appeared to be giving Russian intelligence a back door into any computer it was installed on.
“Facebook is not in a position to make definitive attribution to the actors sponsoring this activity.” In fact, they had a pretty good idea by April that “Fancy Bear,” the Russian group directed by the GRU, was behind some of the Facebook activity.
We were trying to get Trump to discuss when it is justifiable to use cyberweapons; he took the conversation to the question of who is stronger and who is weaker, unencumbered by many facts.
Moscow and Beijing posed distinctly different challenges. Russia was the belligerent disruptor: a nuclear-armed, financially broken state that sought to divide the West and cause havoc. China, by contrast, was a peer competitor focused less on short-term disorder and more on long-term domination. The way to get there, China’s leadership was increasingly convinced, was not with nukes or ships but with servers, software, and cables.
if China or one of its national champions controlled the core of Western telecommunications networks, it could make it far easier for China to intercept or reroute traffic, including back to Beijing.
In 2016, American officials and academics began to notice a strange phenomenon. China Telecom—the giant state-owned telephone carrier—appeared to be temporarily “hijacking” some messages running through the Internet. In some cases, basic traffic that should have passed directly to or from the United States and its allies was instead being rerouted thousands of miles out of its expected path—and sometimes for months at a time—through China.
Because China Telecom has eight “points of presence” in the United States—industry-speak for the connection points where a long-distance carrier connects to a local network, essentially serving as an entryway into a country’s digital space—the company seemed to have very little trouble seizing traffic and diverting it temporarily to China instead of its intended destination.
And this was a one-way street, since American firms don’t have the same access inside China (except for Hong Kong) that the Chinese had in the United States.
Zuckerberg had a reputation for being aloof and intolerant of stupid questions, which he was guaranteed to get from members of Congress who were still struggling with Microsoft Word.
The hearing was an embarrassment—less for Facebook than for the Senate.
For Nakasone, the lesson was clear. Cyber operations gave Putin, Xi, Kim, and the mullahs “new ways to mount continuous, nonviolent operations” that over time erode American power—“without reaching a threshold that triggers an armed response.” He warned that the result was that “shifts in the global distribution of power can now occur without armed conflict.” So the whole idea of sitting on our cyber weapons—holding them in reserve—was a prescription for American decline.
“The Russians are too smart to run the same play a second time.” While they are undoubtedly generating new techniques, they appear to be waiting until the next presidential election, when they may have a better chance of having a real impact.
“Facebook’s fake web pages from Russians in the 2016 election will look like the Flintstones compared to what’s coming.”
But the best way to deter attack—and counterattack—is deterrence by denial.
“We’re going to need laws passed that make clear that certain principles need to be respected around the world, that governments need to refrain from attacking critical infrastructure in times of peace or war, or even when it’s unclear whether we’re at a time of peace or war.”
there are steps individuals should take to protect themselves and help to avoid becoming collateral damage. Awareness—about what phishing campaigns look like, about how to lock up home-network wi-fi routers, and about how to sign up for two-factor authentication—can help to wipe out 80 percent or so of the daily threat.
