China’s espionage adds to a growing sense of foreign digital interference in the election, which already includes Iranian hackers attempt to hack and leak emails from Trump’s election campaign—with limited success—and Russia-related disinformation efforts on social media.
Ahead of next week’s full launch of Apple’s AI platform, Apple Intelligence, the company launched tools this week for security researchers to evaluate its cloud infrastructure called Private cloud computing. Apple does put in a lot of effort to become an engineer a secure and private AI cloud platform, and this week’s release includes many detailed technical documents Security features as well as research environment are already included macOS Sequoia Beta release 15.1. The experimental features allow researchers (or anyone) to download and evaluate the actual version of the PCC software that Apple is running in the cloud at a given time. The company told WIRED that the only modifications to the software involved optimizing it to run in virtual machines for research environments. Apple also released the PCC source code and said that, as part of its bug bounty program, vulnerabilities that researchers discover in PCC will be eligible for a maximum bounty of up to 1 million USD.
Over the summer, Politico, The New York Times and The Washington Post all revealed that they had been approached by a source for hacked Trump campaign emails—a source that the US Department of Justice said was working on behalf of the Iranian government. Press agencies all refused to publish or report on those stolen documents. Now it appears that Iranian hackers have finally found outlets outside the mainstream media willing to release those emails. American Muckrakers, a PAC run by a Democrat, published the documents after touting them in a public post on X, writing: “Send it to us and we will take it go out”.
American Muckrakers later released Trump campaign insider information about North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson and Florida Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna, as well as documents that appeared to suggests a financial arrangement between Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a third party. Who is the candidate? dropped out of the race and supported Trump. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein also received and published several hacked documents, including a research dossier on Trump running mate and U.S. senator J.D. Vance that the campaign assembled when Rate him for this role. Klippenstein was later visited by the FBI and warned that the documents were being shared as part of a foreign influence campaign. Klippenstein has defended his position, arguing that the media should not act as “gatekeepers of what the public should know.”
As Russia waged war and cyber warfare against Ukraine, it also waged a massive cyberattack campaign against another western neighbor with which it has a long-standing relationship: Georgia. Bloomberg this week revealed ahead of Georgia’s election how Russia systematically penetrated the smaller country’s infrastructure and government in a years-long series of digital intrusions. For example, between 2017 and 2020, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, attacked Georgia’s Central Election Commission (as it did in Ukraine in 2014), many media organizations, and IT at the country’s national railway company—all in addition to the attack on Georgia television stations that the NSA pinned on the GRU’s Sandworm unit in 2020. Meanwhile, a hacker named Turla, worked for the FSB, the Kremlin’s successor to the KGB, broke into Georgia’s Foreign Ministry and stole gigabytes of officials’ emails over several months. According to Bloomberg, Russia’s hacking efforts are not limited to espionage but also appear to include preparations for disruption of Georgia’s infrastructure such as the power grid and oil companies in the field. conflict escalates.
For years, cybersecurity experts have debated what constitutes a cyberattack. An intrusion designed to destroy data, cause disruption or sabotage infrastructure? Yes, it was a cyber attack. Hackers break in to steal data? Are not. A hack and leak operation or a spy mission with a disruptive cleanup phase? Probably not, but there is still room for debate. Yet the Jerusalem Post this week achieved the clearest example of calling something a cyberattack—in a headline no less—that it clearly isn’t: online disinformation society. The so-called “Hezbollah cyberattack” that the news agency reported was a collection of photos of Israeli hospitals posted by “hackers” identified as Hezbollah supporters, suggesting that weapons and cash were stored under them and that they should be attacked. The posts appeared to come in response to the Israel Defense Forces repeating similar claims about hospitals in Gaza that the IDF bombed, as well as another hospital recently in the Lebanese capital Beirut .
“This is NOT a CYBER ATTACK,” says security researcher Lukasz Olejnik, author of the book Philosophy of cyber security And Propagatewrote next to a screenshot of the Jerusalem Post headline on X. “Posting images on social media is not hacking. What a terrible act.”
