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The Chinese spy operation adds to the growing sense of a melee of foreign digital interference in the election, which has already included Iranian hackers’ attempt to hack and leak emails from the Trump campaign—with limited success—and Russia-linked disinformation efforts across social media.
Ahead of the full launch next week of Apple’s AI platform, Apple Intelligence, the company debuted tools this week for security researchers to evaluate its cloud infrastructure known as Private Cloud Compute. Apple has gone to great lengths to engineer a secure and private AI cloud platform, and this week’s release includes extensive detailed technical documentation of its security features as well as a research environment that is already available in the macOS Sequoia 15.1 beta release. The testing features allow researchers (or anyone) to download and evaluate the actual version of PCC software that Apple is running in the cloud at a given time. The company tells WIRED that the only modifications to the software relate to optimizing it to run in the virtual machine for the research environment. Apple also released the PCC source code and said that as part of its bug bounty program, vulnerabilities that researchers discover in PCC will be eligible for a maximum bounty payout of up to $1 million.
Over the summer, Politico, The New York Times, and The Washington Post each revealed that they’d been approached by a source offering hacked Trump campaign emails—a source whom the US Justice Department says was working on behalf of the Iranian government. The news outlets all refused to publish or report on those stolen materials. Now it appears that Iran’s hackers did eventually find outlets outside the mainstream media that were willing to release those emails. American Muckrakers, a PAC run by a Democratic operative, did publish the documents after soliciting them in a public post on X, writing, “Send it to us and we’ll get it out.”
American Muckrakers then published internal Trump campaign communications about North Carolina Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson and Florida Republican representative Anna Paulina Luna, as well as material that seemed to suggest a financial arrangement between Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the third-party candidate who dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein also received and published some of the hacked material, including a research profile on Trump running mate and US senator JD Vance that the campaign assembled when assessing him for the role. Klippenstein subsequently received a visit from the FBI, he’s said, warning him that the documents were shared as part of a foreign influence campaign. Klippenstein has defended his position, arguing that the media should not serve as “gatekeeper of what the public should know.”
As Russia has both waged war and cyberwar against Ukraine, it’s also carried out a vast campaign of hacking against another neighbor to the west with whom it’s long had a fraught relationship: Georgia. Bloomberg this week revealed ahead of the Georgian election how Russia systematically penetrated the smaller country’s infrastructure and government in a yearslong series of digital intrusion operations. From 2017 to 2020, for instance, Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, hacked Georgia’s Central Election Commission (just as it did in Ukraine in 2014), multiple media organizations, and IT systems at the country’s national railway company—all in addition to the attack on Georgian TV stations that the NSA pinned on the GRU’s Sandworm unit in 2020. Meanwhile, hackers known as Turla, working for the Kremlin’s KGB successor, the FSB, broke into Georgia’s Foreign Ministry and stole gigabytes of officials’ emails over months. According to Bloomberg, Russia’s hacking efforts weren’t limited to espionage but also appeared to include preparing for disruption of Georgian infrastructure like the electric grid and oil companies in the event of an escalating conflict.
For years, cybersecurity professionals have argued about what constitutes a cyberattack. An intrusion designed to destroy data, cause disruption, or sabotage infrastructure? Yes, that’s a cyberattack. A hacker breach to steal data? No. A hack-and-leak operation or an espionage mission with a disruptive clean-up phase? Probably not, but there’s room for debate. The Jerusalem Post this week, however, achieved perhaps the clearest-cut example of calling something a cyberattack—in a headline no less—that is very clearly not: disinformation on social media. The so-called “Hezbollah cyberattack” that the news outlet reported was a collection of photos of Israeli hospitals posted by “hackers” identifying as Hezbollah supporters that suggested weapons and cash were stored underneath them and that they should be attacked. The posts seemingly came in response to the Israeli Defense Forces’ repeating similar claims about hospitals in Gaza that the IDF has bombed, as well as another more recently in Lebanon’s capital city of Beirut.
“These are NOT CYBERATTACKS,” security researcher Lukasz Olejnik, the author of the books The Philosophy of Cybersecurity and Propaganda, wrote next to a screenshot of the Jerusalem Post headline on X. “Posting images to social media is not hacking. Such a bad take.”