NEWSLINK: “It’s the Russians! … or Is it? Cold War Rhetoric in the Digital Age” – ICIT/James Scott

“…. Western systems lack the security and resiliency to withstand foreign compromise. Moreover, Incident Response techniques and processes are not comprehensive or holistic enough to definitively attribute an incident to a specific threat actor from the multitude of script kiddies, hacktivists, lone-wolf threat actors, cyber-criminals, cyber-jihadists, hail-mary threats, and nation-state sponsored advanced persistent threats (APTs), who all possess the means, motive, and opportunity, to attack minimally secured, high profile targets. Organizations such as the DNC, RNC, Whitehall, and the German Bundestag have all been targeted in cyberattacks launched with the possible intention of influencing global politics [1] [2]. These incidents aimed to influence voter confidence by hindering public opinion through leaked emails, social media hashtags, and disinformation. In particular, the DNC and RNC hacks demonstrated to the global community that the United States was not cyber-secure and adversaries capitalized on that exploitable vulnerability. It would be easy to baselessly declare that all of the attacks were launched by Russia based on the malware employed; however, other threat actors such as Anonymous, Comment Crew, Desert Falcon, etc. could easily emulate the tools, tactics, and procedures of a Russian nation-state APT attack.”