Head Tale

Most recent US Presidential elections get tagged as the first “something” – the first TV election, the first Internet election, etc.

I think it’s pretty clear that 2016 is the first Cyber-Security election…

• Early in the campaign, Bernie Sanders’ staff accessed a Democratic National Committee database containing info about the Clinton campaign via a security hole in the DNC system
• There are numerous ongoing issues with Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server from when she was Secretary of State including everything from how a number of Clinton e-mails had been deleted but then restored via a cloud backup that Clinton’s team wasn’t even aware of to questions of how many of these e-mails were meant to be classified to whether a foreign power had hacked her private server
• This includes her e-mail allegedly being accessed by a Romanian hacker named Guccifer
• Not technically “cyber-security” in the purest sense but the Clinton campaign has been slammed for virtual “astro-turfing” by paying people/companies/bots to post positive comments and stories about their campaign on sites across the web rather than relying on organic user-generated content (to be fair, all campaigns try to direct online conversations to different degrees – Clinton is just the most blatant.)
• Donald Trump appeared to encourage Russia to try to hack US networks to find missing Clinton e-mails
• the ongoing releases of internal DNC e-mails courtesy hacker(s) calling themselves Guccifer 2.0 via WikiLeaks has led to the resignation of the DNC Chairperson and some other staffers as well.
• [Added: The man in charge of setting up Hillary Clinton’s personal e-mail server apparently went to Reddit for tech help with some questions about removing the name of a “VERY VIP” client from already sent e-mails.  Reddit users discovered some of his posts and then were able to verify his identity by finding the same user name being utilized on other sites as well which isn’t quite the same as hacking servers but still using people’s digital footprints to find information.]
• [Added: 4Chan Hackers may have wiped Clinton campaign chair’s iPhone.]
• [Added: FBI Director, James Comey, finds e-mails in a separate investigation into serial sexter, Anthony Weiner, that may relate back to the Hillary Clinton investigation since Weiner’s estranged partner, Huma Abedin, is Clinton’s top aide and the couple shared a laptop in the past.]
• [Added: Definitive proof that a server owned by the Trump organization is secretly communicating with a Russian bank?]
• [Added: And now that the election is over and Trump has won, there is speculation about whether the results could have been hacked by Russia or otherwise and to what degree.]

Those are just a few of the major incidents off the top of my head.  I’m sure there are others!