A former adviser to President Obama predicts that nation-states and others will try to use cyber intrusions to disrupt future election processes and “weaponize” data as Russia did during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The hacks targeting high-level Democratic Party officials marked a “new threshold” in cyber activity, Lisa Monaco, who advised Obama on homeland security and counterterrorism, told CNN commentator David Axelrod on his podcast “The Axe Files.” “We in the United States have entered a new threshold and crossed into a new threshold where we have state actors and others trying to use these cyber tools in new ways to intrude in our election process, to weaponize information,” Monaco said.
“What we’ve seen from the intelligence professionals is a clarity on the fact that whether it’s Russia or others — and copycats or nation-states or other nonstate actors — that we are bound to see something like this again,” she said during the podcast episode released on Monday.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded in January that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a cyber-enabled influence campaign against the presidential election, with the goal of undermining the U.S. democratic process and hurting Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
Officials first publicly tied the Russian government to the hack of the Democratic National Committee last October. Monaco said she first became aware of the Russia connection “sometime over the summer.
Full Article: Former Obama adviser: Election-style hacks ‘bound’ to happen again | TheHill.