Hackers Are Coming for the 2020 Election -- And We're Not Ready

Anthony Ferrante had just arrived for work at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, when the first attack hit. Around 7 a.m., internet service went out across the United States and parts of Europe. Reddit, Netflix, and The New York Times website wouldn’t load. Ferrante couldn’t check Twitter for updates because that was down too. “No one knew what it was,” he says. “It was definitely chaotic.”

It was Friday, October 21st, 2016. In two weeks, Americans would pick a new president. When Ferrante, a director in the White House’s cybersecurity team, realized the internet had gone dark across the country, he feared the worst. Ferrante thought he was witnessing a dry run for an attack on the election.

A native of Portland, Maine, with pale Nordic features and a sharp widow’s peak, Ferrante hacked his first computer when he was 10 and studied computer science at Fordham. He was destined for a cushy career as a cyber expert in the private sector when the September 11th attacks happened. He quit corporate America, joined the FBI, and specialized in tracking terrorists on the internet; in his first case at the bureau, he helped foil the terrorist plot to blow up the PATH train tunnel between New York and New Jersey. Over the next decade, he rose to become one of the FBI’s top cyber-security agents and helped write President Obama’s directive that created the first chain of command in the event of a major cyberattack on U.S. soil.

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Obama hit Russia with new sanctions and expelled 35 of its diplomats in his final days in office, but it would be up to his successor to protect against future election attacks. Soon after Trump took office, a team of cyber experts who worked in the Obama White House met with a group of Trump aides including Joshua Steinman, a cybersecurity aide to the new national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. (Steinman is now the cybersecurity adviser to the president.) According to people familiar with the meeting, when the Obama staffers told Steinman they wanted to talk about Russian interference, they were met with a blank stare.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-election-hacking-russia-iran-ransomware-interference-938109/