The Chinese spy operation adds to the growing sense of a tumult of foreign digital interference in the election, which has already included Iranian hackers attempting to hack and leak Trump campaign emails (with limited success) and the disinformation efforts linked to Russia on social media. media.
Ahead of next week’s full launch of Apple’s artificial intelligence platform, Apple Intelligence, the company this week unveiled tools for security researchers to evaluate its cloud infrastructure known as Private Cloud Compute. Apple has gone to great lengths to design a secure and private AI cloud platform, and this week’s release includes extensive detailed technical documentation of its security features, as well as a research environment that is now available in the beta version of macOS Sequoia 15.1. Testing features allow researchers (or anyone) to download and evaluate the actual version of PCC software that Apple is running in the cloud at any given time. The company tells WIRED that the only modifications to the software relate to optimizing it to run on the research environment’s virtual machine. Apple also released PCC source code and said that as part of its bug bounty program, vulnerabilities researchers discover in PCC will be eligible for a maximum bounty payment of up to $1 million.
Over the summer, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post revealed that they had been approached by a source offering hacked emails from the Trump campaign, a source the US Department of Justice said was working on behalf of the Iranian government. All media outlets refused to publish or report on these stolen materials. Now it appears that the Iranian hackers finally found outlets outside of the mainstream media that were willing to publish those emails. American Muckrakers, a PAC run by a Democratic operative, released the documents after requesting them in a public post on X, writing, “Send it to us and we’ll get it out.”
American Muckrakers then published internal Trump campaign communications about North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson and Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, as well as material that appeared to suggest a financial deal between Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the third. candidate who dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. Freelance journalist Ken Klippenstein also received and published some of the hacked material, including an investigative profile on Trump’s running mate and US Senator JD Vance that the campaign put together when evaluating him for the job. Klippenstein later received a visit from the FBI, he said, warning him that the documents were shared as part of a foreign influence campaign. Klippenstein has defended his position, arguing that the media should not serve as “gatekeepers of what the public should know.”
While Russia has waged war and cyberwar against Ukraine, it has also carried out a vast hacking campaign against another neighbor to the west with which it has long had a tense relationship: Georgia. Bloomberg revealed this week, ahead of the Georgia election, how Russia systematically penetrated the smaller country’s infrastructure and government in a year-long series of digital intrusion operations. From 2017 to 2020, for example, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, hacked Georgia’s Central Election Commission (just as it did in Ukraine in 2014), multiple media organizations, and the national railway company’s IT systems. of the country, all in addition to the attack on Georgian television stations that the NSA attributed to the GRU’s Sandworm unit in 2020. Meanwhile, hackers known as Turla, who worked for the Kremlin’s KGB successor, the FSB, They broke into Georgia’s Foreign Ministry and stole months of gigabytes of officials’ emails. According to Bloomberg, Russia’s hacking efforts were not limited to espionage, but also appeared to include preparing for the disruption of Georgian infrastructure, such as the power grid and oil companies, in the event of an escalation of the conflict.
For years, cybersecurity professionals have argued over what constitutes a cyberattack. An intrusion designed to destroy data, cause disruptions, or sabotage infrastructure? Yes, that is a cyber attack. A hacker breach to steal data? No. A hack and leak operation or an espionage mission with a disruptive cleanup phase? Probably not, but there is room for debate. However, this week the Jerusalem Post achieved perhaps the clearest example of calling something a cyberattack that clearly is not: disinformation on social media. The so-called “Hezbollah cyberattack” that the media outlet reported was a collection of photographs of Israeli hospitals posted by “hackers” identified as Hezbollah supporters that suggested that weapons and cash were stored beneath them and should be attacked. The posts apparently emerged in response to repeated similar claims by the Israel Defense Forces about hospitals in Gaza that the IDF has bombed, as well as another more recently in Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut.
“These ARE NOT CYBER ATTACKS,” says security researcher Lukasz Olejnik, author of the books. The philosophy of cybersecurity and Propagandahe wrote alongside a screenshot of the Jerusalem Post headline on X. “Posting images on social media is not piracy. What a bad shot.”
