Information Battlegrounds

The failures in Iowa’s Democratic Primaries leave much to be desired when it comes to technology that would help us decide the next leader of the free world. The nuances of it all, failures on the front-end, but not on the back-end, are lost on the general public. The company reassures voters that it was the interface that failed to display the data correctly, not that the counts in the database themselves had failed. Nonetheless, in the last week paper ballots were counted and appear to be in line with the initial back-end counts from the software, yet Nevada cancelled their contract with the same vendor for the same mobile caucus tallying system. When systems fail, such as this mobile application, it can cost thousands of cumulative man-hours to compensate for the failure. The larger the system involved in the failure, that is the more data it digests for us, the greater the man-hours spent to recover from a technological failure. Imagine now, instead of a mere failure, the toll that’s taken when a system is purposefully targeted and successfully attacked. 

 The battlegrounds in the Information War are many, and diverse. Hackers can target modern day phones, tablets, laptops, PCs, and even gaming consoles for exploitative purposes. That is to say, your computer and its internet connection are probably more useful as tools to attack others, or to relay spam messages, than for the data contained on it. Likewise, targets of hackers aren’t always the big databases full of private or financial information. Recently we can see instances of hackers going after social media and media outlets. In Lithuania, a local newspaper was compromised by hackers with misinformation that a United States military servicemember infected with the coronavirus had been deployed to their country. In the ten minutes the truly fake news was visible, not much happened. But in the investigation after the fact, the editor spoke about how this wasn’t the first time this sort of attack was attempted, but it was the first time one had succeeded.i 

 We call this ten-minute fake news story an attack, but why? What would have happened if this story had stayed up, un-noticed? Had Tadas Širvinskas, the editor of the city of Kaunas’ daily paper, Kauno Diena, never taken it down, it surely would have caused a national panic in a country where the virus has yet to land. Kaunas is the second largest city in Lithuania, after its capital Vilnius; lending the eyes and minds of a wide readership to the periodical. This sort of attack was a misinformation campaign that was designed to injure Americans, either physically or by reputation, that are training Lithuanian troops, in harm’s way on behalf of the Lithuanian people as much as they are the American people. If this campaign had succeeded, it would have pitted Lithuanians against Americans in a theater already in unrest. 

 I say then, we should be happy that the story was found, removed, and the root cause and mitigation are all being investigated. But don’t get too happy, because there’s always a new or as yet unknown security flaw, vulnerability, exploit, or default administrator password, that will expose a system to hackers and lend itself to misinformation campaigns. More good news though before I go: You don’t have to be the editor of a Lithuanian newspaper to stay vigilant when browsing through information battlegrounds.