Russian hackers are still going to be a huge problem for 2020 elections

Don’t call it a comeback. Russian hackers have been preparing for the 2020 elections for years —and the U.S. still isn’t ready.

Intelligence officials are that foreign interference in the form of disinformation and hacking campaigns are still going to be a major factor in the coming elections. While U.S. companies and government agencies may be smarter after 2016, so are the Russian hackers and trolls.

According to The New York Times, which experts and officials preparing for foreign interference in 2020, these trolls and hackers have been developing more advanced methods to interfere with U.S. elections. Namely, they’re making it harder to track what they’re up to.

“Fancy Bear,” the Russian hacking unit that broke into the DNC servers in 2016, have since moved their operations to the U.S., utilizing servers within the states. Domestic laws limit what the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies are allowed to do in the country. According to security experts, another Russian intelligence unit known as “Cozy Bear” has completely disappeared from their radar over the past few months.

Russian trolls farms like the Internet Research Agency, which weaponized social media to spread misinformation in 2016, are also making themselves difficult to monitor. Trolls are now using encrypted email services like ProtonMail. 

They’re still looking for new ways to exploit Facebook, too. Though the social media platform foreigners from running political ads, trolls have already discovered a way around that. Experts say that trolls are paying American Facebook users to hand over the login credentials for their personal Facebook profiles in order to use the U.S.-based accounts to run ads. They are even opening offshore bank accounts to cover the money’s movement. 

And while some U.S. companies have prepared for hacks based on what they learned from the fallout from the 2016 presidential election, others have not done nearly enough, to Congress. Namely: Hart InterCivic, Election Systems & Software, and Dominion Voting Systems — the three companies that control a whopping 80 percent of the country’s voting machine market.

Readers have probably come across news stories how hackers at events like DEF CON were able to easily break into these systems. The Department of Homeland Security in particular is extremely about voting machine security, especially in light of the news that Russian hackers voting systems in states like Florida. 

Yet, as the Washington Post , at a Congressional hearing discussing cybersecurity on Thursday, the CEO of Hart “defended the status quo” and even “selling paperless voting machines that can’t be audited.”

Officials point out that ransomware attacks on U.S. cities, specifically targeting power grids on Election Day, and lackadaisical database security for vote tallies in American counties are also areas of concern.

Even if Russian hackers and trolls don’t successfully pull the aforementioned hacks or disinformation campaigns off, in essence they’ve already won. Their primary goal is to create chaos. Is this story real? Are the election results valid? Foreign agents are looking to plant uncertainty and doubt in the minds of American voters. Success for these malicious actors comes in the form of poisoning the political discourse and disenfranchising voters.

Now just weeks away from Democratic primary kicking off with the Iowa caucuses, it seems like we’ll find out just how successful they’ll be and how prepared we are sooner rather than later.