The Hack Next Time
Going into the 2020 election, it would be wrong to say the Russians are back. The truth is, they never left.
And this time, when it comes to the cyberattacks and online propaganda, the Russians aren’t alone. North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and others are getting in on the act. They’re devising and carrying out new ways to inject even more chaos and division into our already acrimonious politics. There are domestic actors, too, clickbait profiteers and shady consultants, who will use Russian-style tactics to get their candidate elected or at least bloody up the opposition.
In other words, 2016 was a likely mere preview for what’s to come this year.
The good news is that we’re far more prepared now for potential election interference, from the FBI down to the lowliest county election clerk. It’s hard for the Leslie Knopes of the world to defend against foreign hackers and ransomware attacks, but we’ve come a heck of a long way since the dark days of 2016.
All of this — the next wave of election interference and what we’re doing to secure American elections — is the subject of my latest investigation for Rolling Stone.
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Hackers Are Coming for the 2020 Election — And We’re Not Ready
Why the threats to our elections are more sophisticated and widespread than ever
Rolling Stone | January 17, 2020
Anthony Ferrante had just arrived for work at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, when the first attack hit. Around 7 a.m., internet service went out across the United States and parts of Europe. Reddit, Netflix, and The New York Times website wouldn’t load. Ferrante couldn’t check Twitter for updates because that was down too. “No one knew what it was,” he says. “It was definitely chaotic.”
It was Friday, October 21st, 2016. In two weeks, Americans would pick a new president. When Ferrante, a director in the White House’s cybersecurity team, realized the internet had gone dark across the country, he feared the worst. Ferrante thought he was witnessing a dry run for an attack on the election.
A native of Portland, Maine, with pale Nordic features and a sharp widow’s peak, Ferrante hacked his first computer when he was 10 and studied computer science at Fordham. He was destined for a cushy career as a cyber expert in the private sector when the September 11th attacks happened. He quit corporate America, joined the FBI, and specialized in tracking terrorists on the internet; in his first case at the bureau, he helped foil the terrorist plot to blow up the PATH train tunnel between New York and New Jersey. Over the next decade, he rose to become one of the FBI’s top cyber-security agents and helped write President Obama’s directive that created the first chain of command in the event of a major cyberattack on U.S. soil.
In late 2015, Ferrante moved to the White House to run the National Security Council’s Cyber Incident Response Desk, a small team whose job was to lead the government’s response to a major cyberattack. But by the summer of 2016, his focus had narrowed to a single but growing threat: Russian interference in the election. He and his colleagues had received intelligence reports about strange activity targeting state election websites. At first, the details were sketchy and there wasn’t enough data to draw any connections. Then, in July, the head of elections for Illinois noticed a huge amount of data flowing out of his voter registration system. The FBI discovered that Illinois had been hacked; the culprits accessed databases with information on hundreds of thousands of voters and stole an unknown quantity of data.
The FBI sent an urgent alert to state election chiefs, encouraging them to search their systems for any digital breadcrumbs that matched data from the Illinois breach. Ferrante came to work each morning to find that several new states had been targeted with the same sorts of tools and techniques that Illinois had experienced. With the FBI’s help, his team concluded that Russian-based hackers had penetrated two state voter databases (Illinois was one, the other was not publicly named) and scanned election websites in every state. “We knew at that point we were dealing with a large-scale coordinated campaign,” Ferrante says.
President Obama wanted a national cybersecurity preparedness plan for the upcoming election, and Ferrante was put in charge of creating it. He and his team spent months researching every detail of American elections and running different scenarios. What if a million people showed up to vote in Florida only to be told there was no record of them as a voter? What if a cyberattack took down the division of the Associated Press that supplies election-night reporting data to major news organizations like CNN? What if the internet crashed on Election Day?