3 August 2018 (Hania, Crete, Greece) – The phrase “Bambi in the woods” as applied to cyber attacks was first used by Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times:
Even after all the attacks by Russia and China, we simply have not learned , and much of the U.S. is still like Bambi in the woods. The Russian hack of the U.S. elections in 2016 should have us on our toes for 2018, but the Trump administration has done little to prepare to fight off new hacking. And it will continue.
In my series of posts on the Russian and Chinese attacks I put it as follows:
No country has even come close to the U.S. in harnessing the power of computer networks to create and share knowledge, produce economic goods, intermesh private and government computing infrastructure including telecommunications and wireless networks, using all manner of technologies to carry data and multimedia communications, and control all manner of systems for our power energy distribution, transportation, manufacturing, etc. … and so left the U.S. as the most vulnerable technology ecosystem to those who can steal, corrupt, harm, and destroy public and private assets, at a pace often found unfathomable.
There has been a flood of “newsy” cyber war items this week which I will summarize in a moment but first two very recent books I highly recommend which will (pretty much) give you all the information you need to understand the playing field:
- The Perfect Weapon by David Sanger who has spent decades exploring the intersections of technology and international security and trying to alert us to our vulnerabilities.
- The Darkening Web by Alexander Klimburg who has become the leading specialist on how information warfare has always been the dominant Russian interest in the cyber domain.
I had the opportunity to do a video interview with Klimburg earlier this year at the International Cybersecurity Forum in Lille, France and with John Frank, Microsoft Vice President for EU Government Affairs, who has led the effort for a “Digital Geneva Convention”. Those interviews will post in September.
In the U.S., social media misinformation campaigns are now a permanent fight for candidates and officeholders, and will just get worse with the AI-driven deepfake technologies, which make it easy to phony up images, audio and video. And just these two stories (from scores more):
- An aide to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said that every month for the last 18 months, her office has discovered an average of three to five fake Facebook profiles pretending to be hers.
- Some of that could just be political opponents or profiteers, but Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) last week Russian hackers tried unsuccessfully to attack her Senate computer network in 2017: “Putin is a thug and a bully.”
- The takeaway from all these stories: Campaigns are largely on their own in the increasingly challenging task of protecting sensitive information and countering false or misleading content on social media.
Partly because of rising questions from Capitol Hill, the administration is trying to show that it’s paying attention, despite contradictory signs and seeming nonchalance by Trump.
- Check out this photo:
From left: national security adviser John Bolton, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen and Paul Nakasone, commander of the U.S. Cyber Command
Rarely do you publicly see this many national-security officials in one place. And it’s even rarer for it to be in the White House briefing room, where most of the daily jousting is over inches.
The officials came together yesterday to warn anew about a hidden war by Russia on U.S. campaigns and elections, and to say that they’re on it:
- Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats: “In regards to Russian involvement in the midterm elections, we continue to see a pervasive messaging campaign by Russia to try to weaken and divide the United States.”
- Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen: “Our democracy itself is in the crosshairs.”
- FBI Director Christopher Wray: “Just last week, … we disseminated a list to our state and local law enforcement partners of various foreign influence indicators for them to be on the lookout for — things like malicious cyber activity, social abnormalities, and foreign propaganda activities.”
- National security adviser John Bolton: “We meet on this constantly, the senior staff here at the White House.”
Russia isn’t the only threat, Coats added: “We know there are others who have the capability and may be considering influence activities.”
Reading between the lines of this remarkable briefing: did this press conference happen because the staff realized Trump did deep damage to his presidency in Helsinki and raised real doubts in people’s minds about where his loyalties lie? Did they convince him they needed to signal to the American people that he is not actually in bed with the Russians?
Nah. You can’t admit to Russian interference at the same time you are claiming the investigation that is holding Russians accountable is a witch hunt. So we will continue to see this dissonance.
And whatever you might think of Russia’s recent antics on the world stage, you have to concede: they have brilliantly exploited information-age tools to confuse audiences about what is truth, what isn’t, and to set their own narrative. The returns have been massive … and out of all proportion to the modest investment. The Kremlin goal … which the President of the United States embraces daily … is to exhaust our critical thinking, to hide the truth by seeding a thousand falsehoods around it.
No. Not quite the millennium we were promised. The data-bedazzled twenty-first century was to be a time of painlessly enhanced social justice and seamless market accommodation. Oh, that marvelous “arc of history” was surely bent unmistakably toward a bigger, shinier “Information Age”! The propaganda of progress!! The illuminism of new technologies!! Eh, no. Somebody clearly did not get the email.
