Recently, the American National Security agency (NSA) claimed that the elections held a few days ago in France, had been compromised and hacked by Russian cyber criminals revealing up to nine gigabytes of emails from Emmanuel Macron’s online campaign.
The NSA: NSA Director, Michael Rogers seems to have come under the limelight as it is he who has revealed the news regarding the Russian cybercrime. According to Rogers, attempts to hack the electoral system were discovered early on even before the elections took place.
As such, Rogers claimed in a hearing of the Senate’s Armed Forces Committee, that the NSA had already warned the relevant parties in France. Specifically, they pointed out that some parts of France’s infrastructure have been hacked. Nevertheless, the French seemed to have denied such breaches and did not take any action in this regard at the time.
What were the consequences? After the hack, on Friday, Emmanuel Macron’s political party announced publicly that it had been a victim of a major cyberattack, although it did not say exactly as to who might be behind such an act.
The same group responsible for hacking US Democratic National Committee. According to a report published by Trend Micro, the group that hacked the French election was also responsible for interfering with the US elections in the past.
Furthermore, the attackers also uploaded torrent files which included Cyrillic metadata. The metadata contained the name Roshka Georgiy Petrovich who is alleged to be an employee at a Russian intelligence firm. This was so obvious that some security analysts thought it was simply an attempt by some other country to frame the Russians as such.
#MacronLeaks assessment update: several Office files have Cyrillic meta data. Unclear if by design, incompetence, or Slavic employee. pic.twitter.com/4ge2IMmtHj
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 6, 2017
Nevertheless, Rogers did not have doubts and appeared to be certain that it was Russia who was behind all this. This was clearly evident when John McCain asked Rogers whether he has seen any reduction in Russian behavior and Rogers simply stated that he has not.
Likewise, Senator Elizabeth Warren pointed out clearly that Russians have made yet another attack similar to the one made during the time of US elections. Also, Senator Tim Kaine expressed his views by saying that the attack was an attempt to destabilize the democracy of an ally.
How to counteract the problem? According to Rogers, the only way to tackle the issue is to adopt an approach which deters such behavior and by pointing out the fact that such acts will not go unpunished.
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