Hostile forces aligned with America’s greatest adversary pose a serious threat when it comes to several different aspects of national security. To the casual observer, their efforts to wage a disinformation campaign in the homestretch of the 2022 midterm elections may sound frightening.
China has only one ideological goal as they work to expand its sphere of influence: To promote and drive support for the priorities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
There’s no evidence that they’ve been successful in any meaningful way this time, at least so far. Still, history has shown that new and evolving threats can rise dramatically in a short period of time. That’s especially true when those with superior capabilities lack the will to stop them when bloodshed could have been avoided or minimized. Winston Churchill noted in his post-war memoirs how Germany achieved air parity and then supremacy over the British between 1935-37. While German pilots were secretly trained in the Soviet Union before the Third Reich, the Luftwaffe (air force) didn’t emerge as a force to be reckoned with until two years after Hitler announced its existence to the world in a blatant violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Could the same happen after China’s initial attempts at disinformation cyber campaigns? The answer is obviously yes.
WIRED has more on how this new threat from Beijing could become more formidable in the near future:
On Wednesday, cybersecurity and threat intelligence firm Mandiant published new findings about a group it calls Dragonbridge, which it’s seen for years promoting pro-Chinese interests in fake grassroots social media campaigns designed to influence politics in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Now, Mandiant’s analysts have tied Dragonbridge to a series of more US-focused influence campaigns. The group claimed that a notorious hacking spree carried out by known Chinese state-sponsored hackers was actually carried out by US intelligence, falsely blamed the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipeline on the US government, and—perhaps most brazenly—seeded hundreds of posts on social media designed to demoralize voters and reduce turnout ahead of the November midterms.
“This actor has been rapidly growing and hyper-aggressive. They went from carrying out limited campaigns focused on Hong Kong to a global operation on dozens of platforms,” says John Hultquist, Mandiant’s VP of intelligence analysis. “Interfering in our elections is just another line that they’re clearly willing to cross.”
Mandiant declined to reveal in its report or to WIRED the full collection of disinformation posts that it’s tied to Dragonbridge, but the company says the posts numbered in the thousands. Nor would Mandiant name all the platforms where Dragonbridge had created accounts. But it describes posts published by these accounts arguing that American democracy was being taken over by extreme partisanship, as well as posts pointing to episodes of confrontations and violence between political groups and against the FBI as instances of “civil war.” The group also published a video, Mandiant says, that discourages Americans from voting, making claims about political gridlock and inaction and showing images of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol Building. “The solution to America’s ills is not to vote for someone,” the video argues at one point, according to Mandiant, but “to root out this ineffective and incapacitated system.” All of the content Mandiant identified in its report as part of the Dragonbridge operations has since been deleted, the company says.
…
None of those campaigns, Mandiant emphasizes, was particularly successful. Most of the posts had single-digit likes, retweets, or comments at best, the company says. Some of its spoofed tweets impersonating Intrusion Truth have no signs of engagement at all. But Hultquist warns nonetheless that Dragonbridge demonstrates a new interest in aggressive disinformation from pro-China sources, and possibly from China itself. He worries, given China’s widespread cyber intrusions around the world, that future Chinese disinformation campaigns might include hack-and-leak operations that blend real revelations into disinformation campaigns, as Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency has done. “If they get their hands on some real information from a hacking operation,” Hultquist says, “that’s where they become especially dangerous.”
READ NEXT: Communist China Has Been Detaining American Officials in COVID Camps for Two Years >>
Were doing same during Trumps campaign to date
Arm Taiwan to the teeth!
If we did that there is a very good chance that we would soon become involved in a war against China because of a mistake by some young Taiwanese soldier.