It appears that efforts to combat Russian meddling aren’t going very well. Despite Mueller’s investigation indicting 13 Russian nationals who ran multiple social accounts on different social media platforms to interfere with the 2016 election, it seems that the US has no set multi-agency strategy to protect against Russian cyberattacks. This is according to Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, U.S. Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, from a meeting with the Senate Armed Services Committee today.
“I don’t believe there is an effective unification across the interagency, with the energy and the focus that we could attain,” Scaparrotti told the committee, according to Reuters.
Since the 2016 presidential election interference, US has spent over a year taking apart Russia’s influence and digging for more evidence, Scaparrotti isn’t currently satisfied with the US government’s understanding of the country’s cyber infrastructure that’s in place right now. “We’re getting a better understanding of it, (but) I would not characterize it as a good picture at this point, not satisfactory to me,” he said.
Russian was even behind the hack that took place during the Olympics, and where the Russian’s were trying to frame North Korea to take the fall for the hack. The White House condemned this action, but without understanding the full scope of Russian capabilities, it’s hard to pinpoint what all is entirely going on. Russia’s interference isn’t just in social media either because interference seemed to have slipped into the likes of Reddit and collecting personal information of US citizens. Without a solid strategy in place, we could see a repeat of what happened in the 2016 presidential election in the 2018 midterm election that’s just eight months away.
