Media attention to cyber attacks can be divided into two categories: the endless stream of examples of institutions hacked, and cautious descriptions of potential (and very real) horrors of our vital systems being attacked.
But there’s one area of cyber attacks that conspicuously has received little or no media attention: political hacking.
Practically all our electronic systems are vulnerable to cyber attacks to varying degrees. Political systems rank close to the high end of vulnerability, and indeed most of them are virtually undefended against even a low-skilled hacker.
It’s pretty obvious that these systems are extremely valuable targets for some political activists, and certainly for the aggressive ones. It’s not too far-fetched to assume that some of these activists, whatever their focus, either possess hacking expertise themselves or have access to guns for hire, whether for money or some other consideration.
This hacking potential may impact our lives more than we realize. It’s not technically difficult to hack into a voting system and “adjust” the outcome to the hacker’s liking. Such hacking targets can be at any level – from a poll on a local ordinance to allow dogs on the beach to the election for a head of state. Importantly, it’s not easy to detect such interference, and even if done successfully it takes a lot of time. We can only imagine the political mess if a couple of months after an election it’s determined that a group of teenagers (or some mysterious “Russian or Chinese hackers”) materially changed the outcome, and the wrong people were sworn in to their new hard-earned and increasingly expensive jobs.
On a more subtle indirect note such “adjustments” can be made to the results of public opinion polls, manipulating public opinion in a very effective way.
While it’s understandable that nobody wants to discuss this classic case of a very hot potato, nevertheless we have to realize that we ignore this threat at our own peril.