With all of the usual turmoil surrounding political campaigns, particularly presidential ones, it would seem one more piece of sensational news would not have an impact. But the recent reported hack of the Democratic National Committee’s files, allegedly by Russian hackers, has drawn the spotlight for several weeks. It’s not the first time that a political committee has been hacked during a campaign; Mitt Romney and President Barak Obama were victims during campaigns in 2008 and 2012. But those hacks didn’t seem to have quite the impact this most recent event does.
Perhaps one contributing factor in the focus is all the attention received by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s controversial use of a personal email for government work. Another issue that has an impact is the fact that the alleged hackers were Russian, and Republican Presidential Candidate Donald Trump has made a point of saying he wants to befriend Russian President Vladimir Putin. Apparently, there is a segment of the Russian population that is very much in favor of Trump for president.
And now there has been another hack, giving rise to even more speculation and controversy. Trump’s public comment challenging Russian hackers to discover Clinton’s “missing emails” only added fuel to the fire.
So, perhaps it is not surprising, given all those perspectives, that these hacks have become a focal point in the campaign for our next president. In a silver-lining kind of way, it is not such a bad thing to have the high-voltage spotlights focused on all of this controversy…we as a nation need to pull our collective heads out of the sand – because unfortunately many people not involved in the tech industry or cybersecurity don’t realize the severity of the malware problem we are facing. So the national spotlight, provided by a presidential election that has been controversial from the get-go, may be just the wakeup call society in general needs. You can bet this year’s Black Hat conference in Las Vegas is buzzing with speculation and opinion regarding these latest examples of why cybersecurity is critical.
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