For the last two months, Joe Biden’s campaign has been under attack by Russian state hackers. These attackers have been trying to infiltrate the firm that is behind Biden’s and other Democrate’s campaigns – SKDKnickerbocker. Luckily, these hackers have not been successful in gaining access to the system.
Expert Insight:
Tarik Saleh, senior security engineer and malware researcher at DomainTools:
“As we approach November it is very likely that we will see an uptick in foreign state-sponsored attempts to sway the democratic process. The fact that there was an attempt to compromise SKDK’s network but that the cyber defences in place were sufficient to spot and block the attack is certainly a good sign. We must also remember, however, that very often all it takes for an incident to happen is an employee to click on the wrong link – it would be a good idea for all the organisations involved to refresh their staff’s cyber awareness training ahead of the next few months.”
Chris Clements, VP of solutions architecture, Cerberus Sentinel:
“This is probably the least surprising news I’ve heard in 2020. Intelligence agencies are tasked with furthering the geopolitical goals of their home country, and an increasingly effective means of doing so is through hacking into the computers, cell phones, and cloud services in use by their geopolitical targets. The hacking attempts do not specifically target one campaign over another- the more intelligence the better, and access to all opposing campaigns allows more insight and strategic options for playing the political chess board. As such the information obtained from any successful compromise is used in a strategic manner rather than being equally exposed.”
