Microsoft, U.S. Officials Flag Foreign Interference Efforts in U.S. Election

Source; CFR

China, Iran, and Russia are pressing their efforts to interfere in the election as the vote approaches, Microsoft said in a report yesterday; it follows a Tuesday statement by an official from the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence that Russian operatives created and spread false content meant to smear Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz. U.S. intelligence officials say the integrity of the vote itself is not at risk, but have issued repeated warnings against digital influence operations as well as an alert on Tuesday that Russia and Iran could try to instigate post-election violence.??

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Microsoft, for its part, flagged in its report that Chinese actors are targeting down-ballot Republicans with online influence operations. It said that an Iranian hacker group performed limited probing of U.S. election-related websites in swing states and reconnaissance of U.S. media outlets and that their findings “suggest Iran is gearing up for additional influence operations close to Election Day.” Russia, meanwhile, has aimed to spread deepfake content targeting Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, the report said. (Microsoft, CNN, AP)

Analysis

“While there certainly have been attempts by China, by Russia, by Iran to involve themselves in our electoral ecosystem in terms of information, and while we are certainly—the U.S. government and major companies—are always certainly monitoring cyberthreats to U.S. electoral systems, in fact there’s no evidence at all that this election would be any less secure or any less credible than any that we have had before. In fact, efforts are probably even greater to secure it and protect it than they have been before. But the feeling, the loss of trust—we all know that once you lose trust, building it back is so incredibly hard to do," CFR Senior Fellow Kat Duffy said at this event on Technology and Electoral Dynamics.

“To adequately address foreign influence in the domestic politics of the United States and its democratic allies, malign foreign influence should be defined and assessed, countermeasures developed, and the risks associated with those responses carefully evaluated. Successful defense against malign foreign influence in democracies will resonate with a wider global audience that embraces self-determination—the right of a country to determine its own future political path,” CFR Senior Fellow Miles Kahler writes in this new report.