National: Whoever Is Trying to Hack America’s Elections Is Getting Smarter | Vanity Fair
Earlier this month, when Facebook executives were asked whether the company had detected any sign of foreign interference in the rapidly approaching 2018 midterm elections, the company hedged. “We know that Russians and other bad actors are going to continue to try to abuse our platform,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, told reporters on a call. “We are continually looking for that type of activity, and as and when we find things, which we think is inevitable, we’ll notify law enforcement, and where we can, the public.” As it turns out, Facebook was already well on its way to identifying a new threat. On Tuesday, the company announced it had detected a campaign to influence November elections by targeting divisive social issues, similar to the effort put forth by the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency in the run-up to the 2016 election. “We’re still in the very early stages of our investigation and don’t have all the facts—including who may be behind this,” the company wrote in a blog post. But, the post continued, “It’s clear that whoever set up these accounts went to much greater lengths to obscure their true identities than the Russian-based Internet Research Agency has in the past.”