The Wiretap: Watch Out For Russia's Fake Election News
by Thomas Brewster · ForbesAmerican intelligence and law enforcement agencies are warning about fake articles and videos created by Russians around Tuesday’s presidential election, claiming they “risk inciting violence, including against election officials.”
A joint statement from the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) suggested the Russian efforts were designed to “undermine public confidence in the integrity of U.S. elections and stoke divisions among Americans.” They now expect the disinformation campaigns to intensify through election day and beyond, with their focus on swing states like Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
One example was the amplification of an article claiming that U.S. officials across swing states plan to commit election fraud via ballot stuffing and cyberattacks. In another, Russian agents promoted a video of an individual falsely claiming voter rolls had been altered to favor Vice President Kamala Harris. The Arizona Secretary of State has refuted the video’s claim.
"In light of continued influence efforts by foreign adversaries and the increasing volume of inauthentic content online, CISA recommends voters seek out information from trusted, official sources, in particular, state and local election officials,” the government advised.
In one of four updates from CISA on election day, the organization said it had not seen any sign of any significant, countrywide cyber incident affecting the election.
“Our election infrastructure has never been more secure,” Cait Conley, senior advisor to the CISA director. Conley said the agency was keeping tabs on Iranian influence operations too, but didn’t point to any specifics.
Social media companies will also have to be on guard. As Forbes’ Emily Baker-White reported last week, Meta’s Facebook ran hundreds of ads from pages falsely claiming the election may be rigged or postponed. Meta’s ad library showed Mark Zuckerberg’s company was paid more than $1 million to run the ads. Subsequently, Meta has chosen to extend its ban on new political ads beyond the election until later this week, though no specific time or date was given. Meanwhile, TikTok is dealing with some internecine battles over how much political content to allow.
Google’s AI Finds A Security Vulnerability
A Google large language model (LLM) was tasked with finding security weaknesses in commonly-used software and managed to find one in open source database engine SQLite. The flaw was fixed within 24 hours of the AI finding it this October.
“We believe this is the first public example of an AI agent finding a previously unknown exploitable memory-safety issue in widely used real-world software,” Google wrote in a blog post. “We think that this work has tremendous defensive potential. Finding vulnerabilities in software before it's even released, means that there's no scope for attackers to compete: the vulnerabilities are fixed before attackers even have a chance to use them.”
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