"Click for Regime Change"
Interesting article by British journalist and Russia expert Luke Harding..
"Even if you’re not forging votes, the internet offers a world of opportunity to debase the democratic process. Candidate not to your liking? Smear him or her. Better still, why not invent a story, say of an ethnic Russian girl raped by migrants in Berlin? (That “story,” spread by Russian state media outlets in January last year and endorsed by a senior Russian minister, was entirely made up.)
Such active measures, it turns out, aren’t expensive. Moscow’s US cyber-operation was a textbook example of how to get big results with minimum outlay. According to the FBI, Russian hackers directed over 1,000 spear-phishing emails containing a malicious link to US officials. The hackers worked their way down a list of US institutions. They began with the White House and State Department, without success. Next, in the summer of 2015, they tried the e-mail accounts of the Democratic National Committee. US intelligence officials believe the Russians penetrated the Republican National Committee, but didn’t release anything. (The RNC disputes this.) The technology involved was kid-like in its simplicity. Once someone clicked on a malicious email, the hackers could “exfiltrate and analyse information,” as the FBI put it. With the DNC they got lucky. Several senior Democrats fell for the bogus emails before Podesta, one—a New York Times investigation found—while half-asleep in Hawaii.
At times, the events of 2016 resemble the plot of a spy novel: cyber-warriors working for Moscow; an autocrat with a personal grudge against Clinton; and another improbable figure, stuck in the Ecuadorian embassy next to Harrods, Julian Assange. The US believes Moscow passed the hacked emails to the WikiLeaks website. Assange denies this, insisting they didn’t come from “a state party.”
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/click-regime-change-russia-putin-election-hacking-democracy-donald-trump
