Countries brace for influence operations, hacking campaigns ahead of historic 2024 election cycle

Billions of people around the world are expected to go to the polls in 2024 in what will be the most consequential election year in recent memory. Although many in the U.S. will be focused on what is expected to be a messy presidential contest at home, voters in the European Union, India, Russia and dozens of other countries will cast their ballots in parliamentary races, constitutional referendums, and presidential elections.

Cybersecurity researchers and government officials are already warning that countries are cooking up influence operations in an effort to sway voters. Disinformation operations and hacking attempts on election infrastructure could also threaten to sow discord and undermine confidence in elections.

Although the U.S. intelligence community said this week that they had no evidence that the 2022 midterm elections were targeted by a “whole-of-government influence campaign” like the one seen in 2016, they declared that Russia and China attempted to influence voters in more subtle ways. Researchers from Recorded Future, the publisher of The Record, also wrote last week that China, Russia, Iran, domestic violent extremists, and hacktivist groups will likely take advantage of the evolving geopolitical threat landscape — namely Russia’s war against Ukraine, Israel’s ongoing conflict with Hamas, and China’s increasing assertiveness over Taiwan — to aggressively target the U.S. election.

“While advanced influence actors will very likely conduct pre-planned strategic influence operations, they will very likely opportunistically leverage official announcements, events, and public statements by prominent U.S. political figures, media personalities, celebrities, and U.S.-based organizations operating at the nexus of controversial political topics in tactical influence operations in pursuit of their objectives,” the report said.

Some officials and social media executives have warned that it could be even more challenging to secure elections in 2024 than it was in 2016. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, for example, said last month that artificial intelligence can make it easier for threat actors to disseminate disinformation on a scale never seen before.