Computer security experts tell The Daily Beast they have yet to see any big Russian election interference effort targeting the 2018 midterms in the same way hackers attacked in 2016, but they warn that does not mean we're in the clear.
By the first week of October 2016, Russia’s pawprints were all over the presidential race. Wikileaks had already dumped thousands of DNC emails stolen by Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, the GRU, and was on the verge of doing the same to Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. A persona created by Russian intelligence was giving press interviews and chatting with a member of Donald Trump’s inner circle. Provocateurs at Russia’s infamous troll factory in St. Petersburg had already organized pro-Trump and anti-Clinton rallies around the country, drawing hundreds of Americans into the streets to wave MAGA signs and dangle from Vladimir Putin’s invisible strings.
This year, crickets.
Russian social media trolls are, of course, still promulgating fake news and slapping franticly at America’s hot buttons—tweeting wildly in favor of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, according to researchers, and pushing a counter-protest against last summer’s white supremist Unite the Right 2 rally. The GRU is still hacking into computers in the U.S. and everywhere else. But so far, Russia-watchers say the trolls haven’t delved into the nitty gritty of 35 Senate campaigns and 435 House races. Nor has the GRU engineered the type of damaging email dumps that tentposted the 2016 election circus.
(...)
Of course, nobody is sounding the all-clear on the midterm election. Russia has an arsenal of disruption capabilities -- previously deployed again Ukraine -- that the Kremlin could conceivably train on the U.S. in an attempt to sow havoc on election day. “The idea that they could stage municipal attacks to interfere with people getting to the polls in certain areas, messing with electricity, or traffic lights, or mass transit, those are all things that we think that they tried when attempting to influence recent European elections,” said attorney Christopher Ott, a former Justice Department prosecutor who worked on the DNC hack prior to Mueller’s appointment.
(...)
Theories abound as to why the Kremlin appears to be staying its hand so far. The potential gains for Russia are murkier in 2018, and Putin might prefer to keep his powder dry for European elections in 2019, or the 2020 U.S. presidential race. Russia is also fast becoming an international pariah after the GRU’s March nerve agent attack in London, which nearly killed an agency defector and his daughter, and did kill a 44-year-old mother of two who stumbled on the discarded chemical weapon following the assassination attempt. And, of course, the Kremlin has lost the the advantage of surprise it held two years ago.
“The rewards of steering Congressional outcomes may be outweighed by the risk of further solidifying opposition to Russia,” said John Hultquist, threat intelligence manager at FireEye.
(...)
According to a former senior U.S. cybersecurity official, the Kremlin enjoyed such runaway success in 2016—encouraging American political chaos and helping elect Donald Trump—that substantial interference in the midterm elections isn’t necessary. Instead, the Russians can focus on other targets, such as influencing the European parliamentary elections in the spring of 2019.
As for the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency, it still is going strong.
Today the troll factory is using a mix of surviving accounts and new ones to do what it’s always done, spread fake news and fan division on Twitter, said Ryan Fox, a former NSA official now serving as COO of the smear-fighting startup New Knowledge. It’s also sneaking back onto Facebook, which discovered and deleted a fresh batch of fraudulent IRA-linked profiles and group pages in July. So far, though, none of the accounts are doing anything special for the election. “Lately, it’s been Kavanaugh all day, all the time,” said Fox ...
... The indicted Russian businessman who funded the IRA is now pouring resources into a new venture called USA Really, a Russian site dedicated to pushing anti-American propaganda. Unlike the IRA’s deceptive websites and Facebook groups, USA Really doesn’t disguise itself as a domestic U.S. entity, and it has real people on its masthead. In the short term, that makes it less effective at influencing Americans, but it also makes the site harder to target with a rational social media policy. Fox thinks that model is the future of Russia’s information operations. “They’re out in the open now,” said Fox. “You can’t just call them out as Russian bots. You have to get into a debate about who counts as a journalist.”
Researchers: No Evidence That Russia Is Messing With Campaign 2018—Yet (Daily Beast)