The White House confirming that Iran is working to influence the presidential election in the
United States. So what is the significance of the recent hack reported by the Trump campaign?
Joining me now to assess is Hank Thomas, managing partner of Strategic Cyber Ventures.
Hank Thomas, thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having me.
It's great to have you, Hank. So Politico reporting the internal communication from
Trump's campaign were hacked, the campaign blaming Iran. What do you make of this,
the timing? And what would an appropriate U.S. response look like?
I don't think the timing is coincidental. I think that it's
sowing layers of chaos on top of chaos that already exists that's easy to do in the cyber
realm. An appropriate U.S. response would probably be something in the clandestine world.
Since this is a cyber operation, I would imagine, you know, one of our biggest strengths is sort of
a mutual assured destruction in cyber, which is why we haven't seen a lot of large cyber
attacks the scale of Pearl Harbor. I think sometimes people discuss, but there will
probably be a clandestine response by one of our cyber forces in the U.S. government.
What are the potential implications of this incident for U.S.-Iran relations,
especially given the recent intelligence reports on Iranian plots to assassinate Trump?
And likewise, what are some of your other concerns heading into this election
season in terms of our cyber vulnerability?
You know, so information operations performed via cyber is much easier than it was to do back
in the Cold War or even just a few years ago, especially with the advent of deep fakes and
things like that. I think no matter which administration takes charge in January, we're
going to have to take a much more hands-on approach with Iran than we have in the past. I
think over the past four years, it's been very much a hands-off approach, which is what the
Iranians are really concerned about, especially if Trump were to go into office again.
Now, Microsoft reported that Iranian hackers sent the phishing email to a high-ranking
official in the campaign. They didn't name the target. What more is needed to link these
hackers to the Trump campaign breach, in your opinion?
You know, Microsoft has all the indicators of compromise they need to basically put a
fingerprint to who the adversary was for this. I'm assuming that high-ranking official was
somebody that had access to either the JD Vance or the Donald Trump emails or both or
multiple forms of email. So the indicators of compromise are the fingerprints that cyber
investigators use to tie these things back to threat actors. Now, threat actors often try to
mask their indicators of compromise or sometimes try to make it look like they're coming from
somewhere else. But if it's Microsoft saying this and they're reporting this fairly publicly at
this point, I would assume they're pretty rock solid in their IOCs.
Hank, is it fair to say in your expert opinion that the United States is still
supreme when it comes to cyber capabilities throughout the world?
Absolutely. We're still ranked supreme, although threat actors around the world
have garnered capabilities because they're basically open source at this point.
They're getting closer to our capabilities, but our capabilities are always a few steps ahead,
or at least they are up until this point. So that really gives us a little bit of a comfort
when it comes to a major event because we can always hit back harder.
Hank Thomas, really appreciate your perspective. Thank you.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
