The Long Tentacles of Russia's Hackers

This week we found out new details about the reach of Russian backed hackers with the release of information from a leaked NSA report that earlier this year, Russian backed hackers were attempting to "phish the credentials of employees at VR Systems, a Flordia-based tech firm that sells equipment and software used in voter registration".  Andy Greenberg's article for WIRED goes on to detail the extensive efforts that the Russian backed hackers have taken over the past decade to interfere in elections in their own country and in other democracies across the globe.  Their efforts have grown from simply attempting to flood the servers of political website with malware in an attempt to slow them down or take them offline at key times in a political campaign to their most recent successes of hacking into emails of the political parties of the US and French presidential candidates.   I found this to be extremely troubling to know of the depths of the efforts over the past years of the Russian backed hackers and that their efforts are only growing more daring and unfortunately more successful.  The fact that the Russians can come so close to disrupting the election process by casting doubts on the results is extremely troubling, and even more troubling is that President Trump has made no mention of such attacks.  He has not asked for any inquiries into who is behind these attacks by the many government agencies that report to him, instead choosing to continually focus on the fact that he won the election in every speech to the American people since he has been elected. It is deeply disturbing that the President does not direct or appear focused on finding out who is behind and potentially stopping these attacks and instead seeks to deepen our diplomatic ties with Russia.  This only gives more weight to the testimony of James Comey this week that President Trump attempted to influence the Russian investigations.  It seems that the President is more aligned to his own interests, whether they be influenced in some way by business ties with Russia, then by protecting the democracy of our country by stopping the interference in our election process by the Russian backed hackers.


https://www.wired.com/story/russia-election-hacking-playbook?mbid=nl_6917_p2&CNDID=