With the 2018 midterm election coming up, there's a lot of talk about cyberattacks and hacking.
This kind of electioneering was a big deal in 2016, and it's not going away.
So how exactly does one "hack" an election?
Does it mean changing vote totals?
Well, yes that can be one form of election hacking...
But so far there are no documented cases of that occurring (in the United States, at least).
There are other, less direct ways of course. And that's what we're going to talk about.
Here's how to hack an election...
Intelligence plays a big part in any election. Incriminating information can torpedo a campaign. Nefarious parties might also be interested in donor information, target demographics, or strategy.
Phishing is one illicit technique that's deployed to get that information.
This is what Russian hackers used to successfully attack Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman John Podesta in 2016.
The hackers simply sent Podesta an email that looked like it was coming from Gmail, prompting him to change his password. But when he clicked the button in the email, it automatically entered his username and password, revealing his login credentials.
As soon as he did that the Russians had access to all his email. Then they downloaded it, took screenshots, and sent it to Julian Assange to publish on WikiLeaks.
In March, authorities revealed that GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency, targeted at least 109 Clinton campaign staffers with 214 unique phishing emails. In the end, all it took was one.
It's a simple tactic, but it can also be slyly disguised.
In August, Microsoft said Russian and Iranian hackers had used its Azure cloud platform to set up fake domains to target other political campaigns with phishing attacks. To dupe recipients of phishing email, the hackers established realistic-looking websites and misappropriated company trademarks and logos.
Ultimately, the pursuit of information is really just part of a bigger goal, which is to influence public opinion. And another way to do that is to misinform the public.
That's right: "Fake news!"
All around the world, there are entire rooms, warehouses, and even cities full of people that do nothing but disseminate misinformation.
They're called "trolls" and the operations are "troll farms" or "troll factories."
In the run up to the 2016 election, Russia set up an entire company that employed hundreds of people. It had a budget of $1.25 million per month. And it used information (Social Security numbers and birth dates) stolen from U.S. citizens to create fake online personas.
They created thousands of fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. And they used these accounts to peddle false rumors and derogatory posts about Hillary Clinton, while boosting her rivals Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. The group also encouraged minorities not to vote, inflamed racial tensions, and promoted Russian interests.
Similarly, the small Macedonian city of Veles, was the nexus of thousands of Fake News attacks.
With a population of just 45,000, the city had registered at least 140 websites with names like USConservativeToday.com and TrumpVision365.com that published sensationalist, false, and often plagiarized content catering to American conservatives.
Some articles claimed that the pope had endorsed Trump for president. Others said Chelsea Clinton wasn't actually Bill Clinton's daughter. The posts were engineered to go viral on Facebook, and were reportedly netting locals as much as $3,000 a day from millions of page views.
Over the summer, Facebook alerted Congress to a multiple new disinformation campaigns ahead of November's elections.
The company found dozens of fraudulent pages, 10,000 inauthentic posts, and 300,000 accounts - all of them Fake News.
This marks an escalation from Russia's 2016 effort, in which Facebook discovered 2,700 fake accounts and more than 80,000 fraudulent posts.
Similarly, Google found two accounts linked to Russian hackers that bought $5,000 worth of ads during the 2016 election, as well as 18 YouTube channels likely backed by Russian agents.
It's not just Russia, either.
China, North Korea, Iran and others also have cyberintelligence units that engage in propaganda. They're constantly at work, pushing political agendas and looking to undermine adversaries.
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As I mentioned earlier, there have been no documented incidents of vote tampering in America... so far.
But it could certainly happen.
Voting machines themselves are pretty rudimentary. They have very specific functions, and are very easy to manipulate if you have access to them.
At the world's largest hacker conference, DEF CON, one hacker took control of a Diebold TSX voting machine - versions of which are in use in at least some areas of 20 states - and turned it into a jukebox that played music from its speakers while displaying an Illuminati logo.
Furthermore, a hacker wouldn't even have to change the vote to sow discord. It'd perhaps be easier to simply hack into a web site, like CNN or Fox News, or that of the election commission, and post fake results.
Imagine for instance, if on November 9, 2016, the Federal Election Commission came out and said that Donald Trump didn't actually win; that despite what you saw reported on television, and on the Internet, Hillary Clinton was actually elected president.
There'd be mayhem. It'd take months of recounts and litigation to sort out. And even after all the dust had settled, half the country would still believe they got hosed.
It would undermine our democracy.
It wouldn't be especially hard, either.
Back at DEF CON, one large room, a "Voting Village," was set aside for kids aged 8 to 16. It was filled with computers displaying 13 imitation election websites set up to register vote tallies.
Of the roughly 50 children in the room, 30 were able to hack into the websites and change the results.
And they did it quickly.
Audrey, an 11-year-old girl, figured it out in just a few minutes, hacking her way into a replica of the Florida secretary of state's website and rigging the count to make it look like Libertarian candidate Darrell Castle won Florida's presidential vote in 2016.
"It took maybe a minute or so, because I'm a fast typer," she told BuzzFeed News. "You can [subtract] points, you can do whatever you want."
That's how easy it is.
Make no mistake, our election apparatus is extremely vulnerable.
Especially since Congress has repeatedly rejected additional funding to combat election threats. There simply hasn't been much action on this issue.
In fact, if I didn't know any better, I'd say certain parties want our electoral process to stay compromised.
We'll just have to see what happens come November.
Fight on,
Jason Simpkins
Jason Simpkins is Assistant Managing Editor of the Outsider Club and Investment Director of The Wealth Warrior, a financial advisory focused on security companies and defense contractors. For more on Jason, check out his editor's page.