The Chinese spy activity adds to the growing sense of foreign digital interference in the election, which has already included an attempt by Iranian hackers to hack and leak emails from the Trump campaign—with limited success—and efforts to spread Russian-linked disinformation throughout the public sphere. the media.
Ahead of next week’s full launch of Apple’s Apple Intelligence platform, the company released tools this week for security researchers to test its cloud infrastructure known as Private Cloud Compute. Apple has gone to great lengths to develop a secure and private AI cloud platform, and this week’s release includes detailed technical documentation for its security features and research environment already available in the macOS Sequoia 15.1 beta release. The test features allow researchers (or anyone) to download and test the actual version of the PCC software that Apple is running in the cloud at a given time. The company tells WIRED that the only modification to the software is related to making it work on the virtual machine of the research environment. Apple also released the PCC source code and said that as part of its bug bounty program, vulnerabilities found by researchers in PCC would be eligible for a maximum payout of up to $1 million.
Over the summer, Politico, the New York Times, and the Washington Post each revealed that they were contacted by a source who provided hacked Trump campaign emails — a source the US Department of Justice says was working for the Iranian government. The media refused to publish or report on those stolen stories. Now it appears that Iranian hackers have finally found outlets outside of the mainstream media that were willing to release those emails. American Muckrakers, a PAC run by a Democratic operative, published the documents after requesting them on a public forum from 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 Anna Paulina Luna, as well as material that appeared to suggest financial arrangements between Donald Trump and Robert F. .Kennedy Jr., third. the candidate who left the race suggested Trump. Freelance journalist Ken Klippenstein also discovered and published some of the hacked material, including a research profile on Trump’s associate and US Senator JD Vance that the campaign met when vetting him for the role. Klippenstein was then visited by the FBI, he said, warning him that the documents had been shared as part of a foreign influence campaign. Klippenstein defended his position, saying the media should not act as “guardians of what the public should know.”
As Russia has waged war and cyberwar against Ukraine, it has also been waging a major hacking campaign against another western neighbor with which it has long had strained relations: Georgia. Bloomberg this week revealed before Georgia’s election how Russia systematically infiltrated the small country’s infrastructure and government in a years-long series of digital hacking operations. From 2017 to 2020, for example, the Russian military intelligence agency, the GRU, hacked the Central Election Commission of Georgia (as it did in Ukraine in 2014), several media organizations, and the IT systems of a railway company national of the whole country in addition. the attack on Georgian TV stations the NSA attached to the GRU’s Sandworm unit in 2020. Meanwhile, hackers known as Turla, working for the Kremlin’s successor to the KGB, the FSB, broke into Georgia’s Foreign Ministry and stole many gigabytes of officials’ emails over the course of months. According to Bloomberg, Russia’s hacking efforts were not limited to espionage but also appeared to include preparing to disrupt Georgia’s infrastructure such as the power grid and oil companies in the event of an escalating conflict.
For years, cybersecurity experts have debated what constitutes a cyber attack. An intervention designed to destroy data, cause disruption, or destroy infrastructure? Yes, that’s a cyber attack. Hacker breach to steal data? No. A hack and leak job or an espionage job with a disturbing clean-up phase? Probably not, but there is room for debate. The Jerusalem Post this week, however, achieved a very clear example of calling something a cyberattack—on a topic that is not less than what it is—so obviously not: new information on social media. The so-called “Hezbollah cyberattack” reported by the news agency was a collection of photos of Israeli hospitals sent by “hackers” identified as Hezbollah supporters who suggested that weapons and money were stored under them and that they should be attacked. These posts appear to have come in response to allegations by the Israel Defense Forces repeating similar claims about Gaza hospitals being bombed by the IDF, as well as recent incidents in the Lebanese capital Beirut.
“These are NOT CYBERATTACKS,” said security researcher Lukasz Olejnik, author of the book. Cybersecurity philosophy again Propagandahe wrote next to a screenshot of the Jerusalem Post article on X. “Posting pictures on social media is not hacking. It’s such a bad take. “
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