The Perfect Weapon: War, Sabotage, and Fear in the Cyber Age by David E. Sanger

Author:David E. Sanger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 21st Century, Computers, Diplomacy, History, Intelligence & Espionage, International Relations, Political Science, Security, United States
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2018-06-19T03:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VIII

THE FUMBLE

I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key.

—Winston Churchill, October 1939

In the middle of 2015, long before the 2016 presidential primaries heated up, the Democratic National Committee asked Richard Clarke, a hard-bitten national security fixture in Washington, to assess the political organization’s digital vulnerabilities.

Clarke was best known as the counterterrorism chief in the Clinton and Bush national security councils, who had given warning that Osama bin Laden was planning a massive attack on the United States. He was the one who, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, famously told the relatives of victims that “your government failed you,” and blamed President Bush’s White House for ignoring the many warnings he had issued. Embittered by his government experience but very much a DC creature, he went off to start a cybersecurity firm, Good Harbour International.

He wasn’t surprised when the Democratic National Committee called. “They were an obvious target,” Clarke told me later. But he was amazed when his team discovered how wide-open the committee’s systems were. As it stood, the DNC—despite its Watergate history, despite the well-publicized Chinese and Russian intrusions into the Obama campaign computers in 2008 and 2012—was securing its data with the kind of minimal techniques that you might expect to find at a chain of dry cleaners.

The committee employed a basic service to filter out ordinary spam, but it wasn’t even as sophisticated as what Google’s Gmail provides; it certainly wasn’t a match for a sophisticated attack. And the DNC barely trained its employees to spot a “spear phishing” attack, the kind that fooled the Ukrainian power operators into clicking on a link, only to steal whatever passwords are entered. It lacked any capability for anticipating attacks or detecting suspicious activity in the network—such as the dumping of data to a distant server. It was 2015, and the committee was still thinking like it was 1972.

So Good Harbour came up with a list of urgent steps the DNC needed to take to protect itself.

Too expensive, the DNC told Clarke after the company presented the list. “They said all their money had to go into the presidential race,” he recalled. They told him they’d worry about the security issues after Election Day. That response came as no surprise to anyone who knew the DNC as a bailing-wire-and-duct-tape organization held together largely by the labors of recent college graduates working on shoestring budgets.

Of the many disastrous misjudgments the Democrats made in the 2016 elections, that one may rank as the worst.

“These DNC guys were like Bambi walking in the woods, surrounded by hunters,” a senior FBI official told me. “They had zero chance of surviving an attack. Zero.”

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