[forgingahead]

Good reporting, until this paragraph:

Now consider what a well-funded adversary could do on Election Day armed with a handful of .gov domains for some major cities in Democrat strongholds within key swing states: The attackers register their domains a few days in advance of the election, and then on Election Day send out emails signed by .gov from, say, miami.gov (also still available) informing residents that bombs had gone off at polling stations in Democrat-leaning districts. Such a hoax could well decide the fate of a close national election.

Why the need to specify "Democrat" strongholds? Doesn't this attack work for any other political-party strongholds as well? Seems like an unnecessarily partisan position to take.

[katet]

I see what you mean, but I suspect the author might be referring to the Russian disinformation campaign to favour Republicans. I see it just as an example - obviously it can be adapted in either direction, or both just to deter voter participation altogether.

[larnmar]

It would be shocking, though, if it turned out that Russia was the only country trying to influence US elections, though, instead of the only one that has been publically exposed.

[Iv]

I think many countries assessed that they were capable of it, but many would think this was a casus belli. Had Clinton been elected instead, she probably would have sought additional sanctions and a firmer stance against Russia because of this.

[krn]

Yet, with an exception of Iran, the countries with most aggressive foreign policies (Russia, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) seem to currently support the election of Republican nominees.

[C1sc0cat]

Only certain republicans though

[paggle]

I don’t think the Russian agenda favors Republicans — it favors sowing chaos. Trump was certainly that candidate in 2016 but that could change.

[walrus01]

That specific paragraph is a lot of weirdness.

But once you have the domain, somebody who knows what they're doing with DNS and SMTP absolutely could set up proper email services on it (forward-confirmed rDNS, SPF, DKIM signing, DMARC), and send spam with it. It's functionally equivalent to any other domain. Particularly if the intention was to be a one-shot approach that would "burn" both the domain and the hosting services, such as in the days leading up to an election.

A really smart bad actor would use some IP space from an ISP that traditionally has not been a source of spam. Eg: Not an ISP with a lot of low-dollar-value VPS/VM/hosting customers.

There's still some totally "clean" /24 IP blocks out there in the various RBLs and spam listing services if you go searching.

If I were an evil person and did this, I'd try to get the domain at least a few weeks in advance and try to generate a moderate volume of totally legit looking emails, destined for the top 20 major destinations (office365, gmail, etc) and verify from a bunch of sockpuppet accounts that the mail was actually getting delivered. Then I'd turn loose the fire hose.

Should a person want to be really evil, they'd do something like the reverse of what happened to the City of Baltimore with the cryptolocker trojan. Find a list of municipal (water, sewer, gas, electrical, property tax) bill payers and email each of them a plausible looking invoice, with cryptolocker attached. The likelihood of people opening it would be high.

[save_ferris]

The Houston Chronicle reported today that the Texas GOP plans to purchase several domains resembling democratic candidates and run active disinformation campaigns against them using fake campaign sites[0]. Might’ve had something to do with it.

0: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/politics/texas/article...

[drak0n1c]

Another news story today is the lawsuit against the "Devin Nunes' Cow/Mother" Twitter accounts run by anonymous DNC personnel. In each of these incidents the "disinformation" label is used by partisan officials and obsessively repeated by the media (because the creator's identity is not placed in large font at the top), but anyone who looks at it themselves can clearly see that such is satire and opposition material.

This one is particularly great. Made by an enterprising private individual. https://joebiden.info/

[kevingadd]

When was it confirmed that those twitter accounts were run by the DNC and not just ordinary people? Did the owners break anonymity to the press to prove ownership even though a lawsuit is trying to reveal their identity? That's wild.

[lightbyte]

"Devin Nunes' Cow" is obviously a satire account. As the judge ruled, a cow clearly can not tweet so nobody reasonably can believe that is actually his cow.

"ZweinerforTexas.com", "ZweinerforTx.com" are not obviously satire, they look like normal campaign urls and are clearly made to deceive.

[Iv]

I'd say it is an unnecessary position to take but would not call it especially partisan. There is no symmetry in the amount of election meddling that has been done by both parties. Saying the GOP may be a party interested in election meddling is like saying Iran may be interested in funding islamist terror groups. An unnecessary accusation, but hardly a partisan one.

[ekimekim]

Large cities tend to be blue, and you want to pick a recognizable large city name to get the point across. Politics aside, the example would've had less impact for a republican stronghold just because it wouldn't be as recognizable a city name.

[OrgNet]

did he name any cities?

[quantum_magpie]

Yes, Miami.

[green1]

It's a fairly ridiculous scenario in any case.

1. Attacker needs a .gov from a swing state

2. No they don't, because nobody who'd fall for this would analyze the sender address/website URL, let alone for .gov instead of .org/.net/.com, and there's zero need to emulate a gov website anyway, when emulating a news site would be at least as effective

3. It relies on people reading an email on election day before voting and then not bothering to verify what it says anywhere, not having someone tell them it's fake and not hearing about the scam on the news they're watching for the bomb story

[xwowsersx]

Agreed, that was totally gratuitous and it detracts from the article.

[njharman]

That is such a complicate movie plot threat.

Far more direct to just spread those rumors through social media. Which more people pay attention to and believe than .gov. Or just make actual bomb threats.

[minikites]

Democrats _want_ people to vote, most voter registration drives and voter services (offering transportation to a polling place, etc) are run by Democrats or aligned organizations.

[ptah]

related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21110318

tldr; republicans tend to win by slimmer margins compared to democrats

[MereInterest]

One of the major political parties in the US has been repeatedly engaging in voter suppression. Is it partisan to observe repeated behavior on one side of the political spectrum, and to extrapolate accordingly?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...

[judge2020]

Specifying "democrat" in this particular example of how an adversary having a .gov domain could be bad adds nothing to the example.

[9HZZRfNlpR]

For the rest of the world, voting without proper documents screams voting fraud. It's not that black and white.

[soperj]

From an outsiders perspective, there's very little difference between both your political parties.

[microcolonel]

It's a figure, not every sentence needs to have stand-in characters written in to appeal to sensitivities like this. Also, maybe if he chose “Republican” it wouldn't hit home, and it'd sound like he's threatening his audience with a good time. ;- )

It could be criticized regardless of the characters chosen.