Being a professional hacker has never been easier or more profitable than it is today. According to cyberdefense experts at Microsoft, cybercrime will be a $6 trillion industry by 2022. Hacking tools are available on the dark web for as little as $500, with some sold with 24/7 support.
Due to low-cost hacking, elections in the United States and around the world are under constant threat from numerous and persistent hackers. Malware and phishing attacks targeting political campaigns have been detected during recent elections in Russia, Turkey, Colombia, and Azerbaijan. Keyloggers and Trojans were detected in many states shortly before the 2018 US election season, and according to the Department of Homeland Security, during the 2016 elections, 50 states had detected such types of cyber intrusions.
"When you think about attacks on election systems, you have to think about them globally, not just here in the U.S.," said Ann Johnson, vice president of Microsoft's Cybersecurity Solutions Group. "It's really hard to imagine the scale.".
Globally, Microsoft detects nearly 6.5 trillion — yes, trillion — cyber incidents a day. Several million of those are targeted at political campaigns. Many of the “signals” are benign, Johnson says, and using artificial intelligence in the cloud, the tech company works closely with political campaigns to identify and mitigate specific threats. For example, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Microsoft uncovered phishing attackstargetingboth Democrats and Republicans.
Threat actors targeting elections generally fall into certain categories. Johnson said hackers have a variety of reasons for doing what they do: there could be “people who are purely financially motivated and their cybercrimes are related to finance, or people who are stealing electronic identities for other reasons, or fraudsters who want to expose political figures.” The reasons someone might get into the process of hacking into electoral processes and political settings in general are many.
