Phishing Attacks against Trump and Biden Campaigns

Google’s threat analysts have identified state-level attacks from China.

I hope both campaigns are working under the assumption that everything they say and do will be dumped on the Internet before the election. That feels like the most likely outcome.

Tags: China, Google, intelligence, phishing, threat alerts, voting

Posted on June 8, 2020 at 6:13 AM • 10 Comments

nobody • June 8, 2020 9:46 AM

State-sponsored hackers have specific objectives; they’re not just breaking into things arbitrarily.

Russian practice 2016 was to hack both parties but release Democratic emails to help the GOP and keep GOP emails secret, presumably to blackmail the GOP later if necessary. Given that the Chinese, like the Russians, want to put Trump back in office because of the damage he does to American credibility, the reasonable assumption is that they will repeat the Russian pattern.

(Although it’s hard to see what possible use internal mail would serve against the GOP. The kind of things Republican operatives say behind closed doors would only energize their support base if made public.)

nobody • June 8, 2020 12:21 PM

It’s curious that a well-reasoned comment articulating why China is far more likely to leak Democratic emails than Republican ones is somehow unacceptable content here.

You can’t take politics out of the issue when evaluating the risks of politically-directed (state-sponsored) attacks against political parties during the exercise of the political process through an election campaign.

State-sponsored attacks aren’t the results of 400lb overgrown children causing random destruction for the fun of it. They have specific objectives and understanding those objectives helps greatly in preparing defenses. China has a preference for the outcome of 2020 and that preference means that the Democratic party needs to be on guard against intrusions far more than the GOP does.