As Americans vote, will hackers pounce?
In late April, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) suspected that something was wrong with their network and called in the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to investigate. A few weeks later, after routine testing, the suspicions were confirmed: The DNC had been hacked by the Russians. The DNC’s system “lit up like a Christmas tree,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, CrowdStrike’s chief technology officer. The culprits were bad actors CrowdStrike had seen before and given nicknames. “Cozy Bear,” Russia’s Federal Security Service, had been attacking the DNC since the summer of 2015. “Fancy Bear,” which refers to Russia’s military intelligence unit, had started its infiltration shortly before CrowdStrike did its test. As DNC documents were leaked throughout the summer and into the fall, the episode put the United States on notice that Vladimir Putin’s government is intent on influencing the 2016 election, Alperovitch said during a panel discussion at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). That could mean...