Russian Active Measures and the United States - Botnets, Fake News, Hacking

 The Senate Intelligence Committee held two open hearings Thursday, to address the active measures used by Russia against the U.S. Our country was attacked during the primary and general election cycles, and the attacks continue to this day. Senator Marco Rubio said today that he and his staff were targets of social media attacks twice – once in July, when he announced he would run again for the Senate,  and yesterday. Rubio said the attacks came from computers using Internet addresses in Russia.

It is clear from the testimony at the Senate hearings that the U.S. was, and is, under attack for at least a year before the 2016 general election. The attack involved hacks and weaponized information dumps that were carefully timed to help the Trump campaign and hurt the Clinton campaign.
 
Another active measures tactic that is continuing is the use of fake news generated by agents of the Russian government, which are then elevated in popularity using computer-generated personas called “bots.” Bots are algorithm-created, fake social media accounts. With the help of bots, a fake news story can be shared thousands of times to bring the story higher in lists that are then accessed by legitimate news sites, and can be promoted as true erroneously by unwitting users. Sometimes the story is revealed as false, and legitimate news sites print a correction or retraction, but by then the story has traveled around the world and many real people who read it never see the corrected story.
 
So, how is this done? It is surprisingly easy. Scott Pelley on “60 Minutes” promoted a Twitter message with the help of a consultant and the purchase of 5,000 bots from a Russian website at the cost of a few hundred dollars. Pelley wrote a message and the bots elevated his message with more than 4,000 retweets.
 
According to the website searchsecurity.techtarget.com: “A botnet (also known as a zombie army) is a number of Internet computers that, although their owners are unaware of it, have been set up to forward transmissions (including spam or viruses) to other computers on the Internet.” The infected computer is called a zombie or bot.

Computer-generated Twitter, Facebook, or other social media accounts can be created to seem like Americans, even from as far away as Saint Petersburg. Clinton Watts, senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute Program on National Security, explained at the first Senate hearing today that demographic information from a certain area (like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, or Florida) can be mined to create plausible imitations of residents of that area, so the computer-generated personas appear to be real people.

A clip of Clinton Watts explaining how the Trump campaign team and Trump administration have promoted fake news stories can be found here.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4664397/clint-watts-3302017
 
The entire episode of “60 Minutes” that aired March 26 can be found here. The segment on fake news and bots begins at 16:48.
http://www.cbs.com/shows/60_minutes/video/e0iWxt5j6jo2Ym_NgOK7T97_hEfLLEGt/the-attack-in-garland-fake-news-chess-country/
 
The “60 Minutes” clip on fake news can be found here.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/whats-fake-news-60-minutes-producers-investigate/
 
The “60 Minutes” clip in which Scott Pelley boosts his Tweet using bots can be found here.
http://www.cbs.com/shows/60_minutes/video/O1PTE_3ktjUFz2321EtlxIrQuIU_mOmo/bots-have-big-effect-on-scott-pelley-s-twitter/
 
Both Senate hearings can be found here. Hearings will continue next week. Not all of them will be open, due to the sensitive nature of the information.
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/hearings/open

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