Cyber War Amongst Us — Showed Itself in Election 2016

5 min readDec 25, 2018

First part is the introduction from the Office Of Director Of National Intelligence, second part is what I wrote originally on December 10, 2016.

Part 1:

SNIPPET of January 2017 Intelligence Assessment:

Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections ICA 2017–01D 6 January 2017 Key Judgments Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscow’s longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, but these activities demonstrated a significant escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort compared to previous operations. We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.  We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence.  Moscow’s approach evolved over the course of the campaign based on Russia’s understanding of the electoral prospects of the two main candidates. When it appeared to Moscow that Secretary Clinton was likely to win the election, the Russian influence campaign began to focus more on undermining her future presidency.  Further information has come to light since Election Day that, when combined with Russian behavior since early November 2016, increases our confidence in our assessments of Russian motivations and goals. Moscow’s influence campaign followed a Russian messaging strategy that blends covert intelligence operations-such as cyber activity-with overt efforts by Russian Government agencies, state-funded media, third-party intermediaries, and paid social media users or “trolls.” Russia, like its Soviet predecessor, has a history of conducting covert influence campaigns focused on US presidential elections that have used intelligence officers and agents and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin.  Russia’s intelligence services conducted cyber operations against targets associated with the 2016 US presidential election, including targets associated with both major US political parties.  We assess with high confidence that Russian military intelligence (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate or GRU) used the Guccifer 2.0 persona and DCLeaks.com to release US victim data

Part 2:

Donald Trump won the electoral college vote, but lost the popular vote by more than 2.5 million votes. Or did he lose both the electoral college vote and the popular vote if you remove the question of Hacking by Russia?Do you care? Does the Media care to report this correctly and do their jobs for the history of this country or just willing to shrug this off? Do your Members of Congress care? They should. This is digital war.

Cyber warfare that focused on multiple levels of information, politics and technology all to psyche us out. Information warfare that dropped a massive bomb on us. Your house did not get blown up, but your rights, your free country and your democracy just did for sure. It happened on many levels, in many states and at many technological levels. It is not just one hack, but rather a group of hacks, information warfare efforts and propagandistic manipulation of the media.

The CIA and most of the United States Intelligence Agencies are now directly pointing the finger at Russia for Hacking the US Election, and yet the Trump Transition is oddly trying to deflect attention by trying to say the CIA is lying and or wrong. Yet, 15+ US Intelligence Agencies are seemingly in agreement.

During the election, many journalists completely ignored this issue, and instead tried to parade out real or fake emails from Hillary Clinton as proof of dangerous national security actions. The dangerous actions are in letting another country literally hack our election.

Yet we were all fooled and misled by a combination of fake news, fake social media and head fakes by twitter bots and automated facebook posts. The Trump team continues to deflect, deny and use fake news and fake social media accounts as part of their weak defense. This is not a good portend of cyber things to come.

I have been writing about the problem of fake social media and fake news for years. Unfortunately, I am not surprised to see it play such a critical role in this information warfare hack of the United States 2016 Election by Russia, and to help Trump.

Just surprised so many so called patriotic American citizens are shrugging this off like nothing happened. It happened. Wake up.

My company Digijaks, has been at the forefront of dealing with and training to defend against socially engineered attacks for several years. So I want to take this time to reflect a little on the cyber security and cyber war efforts that were just conducted against the United States, by Russia during the 2016 Election; and with all evidence of this pointing to supporting the candidacy of Trump.

Hacked State and Local Election Authorities
Hacked Election Database Vendors
Hacked Voting machines ***(jury still out on this exactly)***
Hacked Social Media with Fake Accounts and Bots
Hacked News with Fake Websites, Fake News
Hacked the DNC
Hacked other Democratic Election Groups
Leaked information in coordinated method through 3rd parties to Wiki leaks, on a coordinated release schedule that was also coordinated with the twitter accounts of both Russian Media and Trump and his associates.

Just to start with.

This is a Constitutional Crisis that makes Watergate look tiny in comparison.

Updates to this since December 2016.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.

BOTS AGAINST US — The book I wrote based on all this can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1092544720?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860

Thank you!

Cyber War Amongst Us — Showed Itself in Election 2016

Written by Alan W. Silberberg