The Trump Email Hack Shows What We’re Up Against

Foreign influence operations were a major issue in the 2016 election, and the Trump email hack this weekend shows they’ll factor into the 2024 election, as well. 

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. 

Cyberwarfare has become a fact of life. Near-peer adversaries like Russia and China see it as a way to wage war on the United States and its allies without actually waging war on them. 

And smaller pariah states like North Korea and Iran see cyberwarfare as a kind of guerilla tactic that lets them “punch up,” so to speak, undermining an enemy they have no shot at competing with.

Again, this isn’t new. China has deployed state-sponsored hacking groups in the People’s Liberation Army to steal intellectual property from U.S. corporations, infiltrate government agencies for decades.

These attacks go far beyond intelligence gathering, too. Both Russia and China have used teams of hackers to infiltrate our infrastructure, targeting power plants, water utilities, rail networks, oil and gas pipelines, ports, and other key operational nodes. 

For example, you may remember the attack on JBS, the world’s largest meat supplier. That shut down operations in Australia, Canada, and the United States, affecting everything from local grocery stores to major chains like McDonald’s.

Or the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack that severed supplies of gasoline and jet fuel from Texas to the East Coast. 

Or the SolarWinds hack, which exposed hundreds of thousands of organizations around the world, including most Fortune 500 companies and government agencies including the departments of Energy, Commerce, Treasury, and State, as well as the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Then there’s Volt Typhoon, a group of Chinese hackers affiliated with the PLA who targeted at least two dozen entities, including Hawaii’s water system and Texas’ power grid, in a series of attacks dating back to 2021.

Microsoft uncovered the effort and described it as a stealth campaign to establish a clandestine presence within critical networks. Then, should hostilities break out, they can spring to action.

Essentially, Volt Typhoon is harvesting data — including credentials from local and network systems — archiving it, and then attempting to blend in to normal network activity by routing traffic through compromised small-office and home-office network equipment, including routers, firewalls, and VPN hardware. 

With that information, the PLA could sow chaos and panic, disrupt key services, and complicate logistics at crucial moments — like during an invasion of Taiwan, for instance.

The clear goal is to disrupt America’s functionality and even harm American citizens in the process. It’s something Chinese military officers describe in internal documents as “network warfare,” to be synchronized with air and missile strikes.

And they’re not the only ones doing it. 

Russia is infiltrating critical infrastructure too — attacks that have escalated since the country invaded Ukraine last year. 

Indeed, NATO countries have been hit with an unprecedented volume of cyberattacks since the war’s outbreak, including a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that affected at least 40 U.S. airports in 2022.

The Russian group, called Killnet, jammed up websites with fake users, forcing them offline. It also attempted to infiltrate JPMorgan’s network infrastructure and assailed websites of three U.S. states (Colorado, Kentucky, and Mississippi).

American allies across Europe, including many that aren’t on most Americans’ radar, have also been slammed by Russian cyberattacks.

Montenegro, Estonia, Albania, and Finland have been among the hardest hit. 

Montenegro was targeted with ransomware attacks so sophisticated that it had to call in the FBI to help out. 

And Albania suffered a cyberattack so great that it considered invoking Article 5 of the NATO charter, necessitating a collective defense from the alliance.

That attack was attributed not to Russia proper but rather to its ally Iran. 

And that brings us back to the Trump email hack, for which Iran is being blamed.

On Friday, Microsoft issued an alert accusing Iran of increasing online activity to influence the U.S. election. 

According to the report, Iranian hackers have spent months creating fake news sites and impersonating activists in an effort to stoke division and potentially sway American voters.

And in the highest-profile case, it said Iran targeted a presidential campaign with an email phishing attack. On Saturday, it became clear that it was indeed the Trump campaign that was targeted as hackers usurped an account of a former political adviser and used it to acquire scores of information and disseminate it to the press.

That Iran is lashing out is no surprise. 

As I discussed last week, the country’s regime has been infuriated by Israel’s ongoing war with Hamas. It seems to have hit a breaking point and is reportedly preparing a serious attack on Israel that could greatly escalate a sprawling regional conflict that’s already pretty heated. 

Authorities expected that attack to come last week, but it seems like Iran is taking its time — making the entire situation even more ominous. 

As I’ve said, the best way to prepare for that escalation is to buy defense contractors. 

But you can also exploit cyberattacks by investing in cybersecurity companies. 

Fight on,

Jason Simpkins

Simpkins is the founder and editor of Secret Stock Files, an investment service that focuses on companies with assets — tangible resources and products that can hold and appreciate in value. He covers mining companies, energy companies, defense contractors, dividend payers, commodities, staples, legacies and more…

In 2023 he joined The Wealth Advisory team as a defense market analyst where he reviews and recommends new military and government opportunities that come across his radar, especially those that spin-off healthy, growing income streams. For more on Jason, check out his editor’s page.

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