Experts Warn Of 2016 Repeat As Cyber Hacks Target Campaigns

The Trump campaign was hacked recently, and reports suggest that Iran could be responsible. Our cyber security infrastructure appears incredibly weak, and our leaders aren’t doing much at all to fix the problems. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Link - https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/11/presidential-campaign-cyber-attacks-00173516

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The Trump campaign has been hacked recently, and reports suggest that Iran could be responsible. Our cybersecurity infrastructure appears to be incredibly weak, and our leaders, well, they're not doing much to fix it. I've got Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins to talk about it. Farron, it is amazing that we know this has happened before. We saw it in 2016. It's not like this is a big surprise. Right. And they're acting like, wow, they might hack us. Really? I mean, this is just now on the forefront.
Right. And you do have politicians on both sides of the aisle right now saying, we've gotta have answers, by God, we've gotta take action. We've gotta do something. Okay. Well, you did have eight years to do something because you knew it was a problem then. You had an issue with it. It obviously made the headlines back in 2016. But what's just as shocking to me is that right now the public doesn't care. This story, sure it's all over the major media sites, but nobody on social media seems to care about. Just kind of going about their days, not being concerned about the fact that, hey, we have foreign countries right now that are actively hacking into campaigns. And that seems like it could be a pretty significant problem.
And it's so variable. We know we've got Russia, we saw in 2016, they've been doing. I'm sure China is just as bad. And Iran now. This time they went after Trump so nobody thought it was as bad as the time they went after Hillary. But the point is, if you think back, we learned everything you wanted to know, what was it called? Guccifer? Guccifer 2.0?
Oh, yeah, that's right.
And you had these Russians that were working for the GRU, which is the elite Secret Service program in Russia, and it's clear that they were hacking. They had been pinging, pinging, pinging time and time again trying to get into the system. But now it looks like everybody in the world's coming after us. I mean, it's Iran, it's China, it's Syria, name it, they're trying to get into not just the political, not just the DNC for example, or the GOP. They're trying to get into really every element of our database. And it's like, well, yeah, we've been talking about this a long time. Why haven't you done anything?
Right. And what people need to understand is this is not necessarily in order to influence an election. Okay. It's not just, oh, let's embarrass them by getting the materials.
Right.
All of these candidates, Biden Harris, excuse me, Trump Harris, they get daily security briefings as the party's official nominee. They do get access to top secret information. These are things they can discuss with certain members of their staff. So there is sensitive American intelligence housed in both of these campaigns. And that seems to be what these groups are after. It's not just about let's embarrass this candidate or embarrass this one. They want to get down to some meat that other people may not realize these campaigns could have.
Well, the Trump, like the Trump hack, we were talking about, they hacked into the narrative and the discussion that they were having with VP candidates to figure out who's gonna be the best VP candidate. There's probably a lot of stuff in there. But it doesn't, you don't look at it and say, oh my God, this is a disaster. But it is a disaster when they get into the state election boards. When they get into security stations of various types all over the country. Actually, I remember Obama talking about this for a very long time. He said, we've gotta do something. We have to do something. I never saw anything happen, but I saw the discussion that something has to happen. Here we are again.
Yes. And now they're having those discussions even harder, is we still need to do something, but still nothing happening.
Yeah.