What A Day - Iran Has (Allegedly) Entered The Chat

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

On Monday, The FBI confirmed it's investigating claims that Iran hacked the Trump campaign. The agency did not publicly release additional information. However, according to The Washington Post, the agency has been investigating suspected Iranian phishing attempts that targeted both U.S. presidential campaigns since June. Sam Sabin, cybersecurity reporter at Axios, explains the growing risks of foreign interference in the upcoming election.And in headlines: The U.S. defense secretary ordered more military vessels to deploy to the Middle East amid fears that Iran will soon launch a retaliatory attack on Israel, Ukraine's top military commander said his forces had taken control of more than 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory, and MTV moved the annual VMAs back a day to avoid a conflict with ABC's September presidential debate.Show Notes:Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Tuesday, August 13th. I'm Josie Duffy Rice. And I'm Traevelle Anderson, and this is What A Day, the show where we're giving our flowers to the Biden administration for unveiling an initiative to make paid subscription services easier to cancel. First the war on junk fees, now the war on chatbots. We love to see that. Gym memberships and streaming services, consider yourselves on notice. Take Planet Fitness down. I beg someone.

On today's show, the U.S. sends a missile submarine to the Middle East to defend Israel as the threat of an attack by Iran looms. Plus, MTV wants its viewers to be civically engaged. But first, on Monday, after years of relative bliss for all of us, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump returned to X, the site formerly known as Twitter. And even though none of us asked for any of this, Trump also participated in a talk on X with the company's CEO, Elon Musk. It got off to a late start as many users struggled to access the conversation. Musk blamed the delay on a cyber attack, although the website hasn't exactly functioned properly

since he laid off 80% of the staff last year. Once things did get going, the two discussed the alleged hack and the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump. What was it like for you? Not pleasant. Not pleasant. I said there was blood. I didn't know I had that much blood. The doctors later told me that the ear is a place that is a very bloody place if you're

going to get hit. But in this case, it was probably the best alternative you could even think about because it went at the right angle. And, you know, it was a hard hit. It was very, I guess you would say surreal, but it wasn't surreal. You know, I was telling somebody. Musk's claims of a cyber attack aimed at his conversation with Trump came the same day that the FBI confirmed that they are looking into a recent phishing attempt against the Trump campaign. On Friday, Microsoft released a report detailing a phishing attempt by an Iranian intelligence unit towards a, quote, high-ranking official of a presidential campaign. Then on Saturday, Politico reported that in late

July, an anonymous source reached out to them and shared confidential documents from the Trump campaign, including a dossier and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance that contained information on his potential electoral vulnerabilities. The New York Times has also said that a source reached out to them offering similar documents. And so Politico has been communicating with the anonymous source for weeks now, and they reported on this interaction. What's been happening since they published their article? So the Trump campaign confirmed to Politico that it had been hacked, and they blamed Iran for the attack, looking into Iranian phishing attempts that date back to June and have targeted the presidential campaigns for both parties. The Post also reported that Trump advisor Roger Stone said his email account was hacked as part of the phishing attempt. For more on the risks of foreign interference in the upcoming election, I spoke with Sam Sabin, cybersecurity reporter at Axios.

She began by giving some context into Iran's recent attempts to interfere in U.S. elections. So they have been pretty heavily involved in U.S. elections the last couple of cycles. I would say that what we're seeing this election cycle so far is an escalation from maybe what we saw in 2020. In 2020, to set the scene, it was like a last-ditch effort, a lot of influence campaigns, things like that, just kind of meant to cause a little bit of chaos, maybe in the fall, right before the vote. What we're seeing now is the intelligence community gave a briefing, I want to say a couple of weeks ago now, to reporters saying that they are now seeing active efforts from the Iranian government to undermine the Trump campaign, mostly through disinformation so far.

That's what the intelligence community said. So that can look like fake news stories that try to point out perceived flaws in former President Trump, or maybe they're celebrating something that VP Harris has done or something like that. And Microsoft also, as part of that report, I mean, that whole report on Friday was just about the ways that Iran has stepped up their game, right? They're now using AI to mimic news articles. So they're kind of training models on existing news stories and then tweaking that to create more legitimate looking fake news stories or things like that. They also were seen targeting a local campaign as well. So it's not just this high ranking presidential campaign that they identified. It's others as well.

So what is the goal? What does Iran want? Do they just want chaos? Do they want a certain candidate to win? Do they want like what is the hope here? Yeah, it's a little bit of both, right? I mean, anytime a nation state is targeting us, whether it's Russia or Iran, especially, it's usually chaos. They want to drive divides in the United States. They see that our country is deeply divided right now. And I mean, any adversary likes to see when their opponent is weak, and you see places that you can exploit it. And so it's pretty easy to just go on social media, feed into it and do that. And of course, nation states are always conducting espionage. That's always a goal. The weird thing about the current reporting around the alleged Trump campaign hack

is that the documents that were stolen were mostly vetting documents for potential vice presidential candidates, right? So J.D. Vance, who of course was chosen for that post, or Marco Rubio as well. And so you could argue maybe it's espionage, but that seems more so like chaos, right? Like you want to leak this to someone and then have, you're already kind of seeing on social media where people are questioning even what's in these so-called dossiers and what is the smoking gun that maybe this hacker is trying to get at. You mentioned Russia, like how does this all compare to Russia's attempts to interfere in 2016? Obviously, that was its own kind of partisan issue, Right. And so how does it compare? the Russian government was found to be hacking the DNC and basically the Clinton campaign and then

just sharing whatever it stole with WikiLeaks and others in the hopes that this information was published, maybe skewed in a different way, things like that. Back then, reporters were kind of new to the experience of like what a hack and leak was. So you saw a lot of outlets going through WikiLeaks reporting on what was seen. And it really did exactly what Russia was hoping for, which was to skew the outcome of the 2016 election. This is kind of similar, right? You're seeing Iran targeting a campaign. And the hope clearly is to kind of pour through these dossiers, see what was there and hope that the smoking gun is unearthed and the election is swayed. Right. So it's actually quite similar. I think the difference is the response, which is you're not seeing those documents fully published anywhere as of right now. And so is there a difference in cybersecurity on our end? Like how much have presidential campaigns and the intelligence community improved their

cybersecurity practices? Is it harder for these countries to use these tactics, take these angles? I would say on the campaigns, it deeply varies, right? On the national level, there is, of course, more money. There are more people who can look into cybersecurity. So the Trump campaign, the Harris campaign, they have way more staffers dedicated to this than, say, your local mayoral race or your senator's race or something like that. So you've seen a lot more focus on cybersecurity on the national level. Now, I will say if this did happen through like

your run of the mill phishing attack, it kind of highlights that even though we are investing more on the campaign level, like very basic human error can still lead to an incident, right? And that's always going to be a factor. I think it's a matter of like how you store information in your networks, things like that, that maybe we're still figuring out. In the intelligence community, it really feels like there are more efforts to kind of get ahead of this stuff, right? So even before the attack, there was a briefing with the intelligence community, which was kind of rare, right? It was very rare for the intelligence community to weigh in on foreign election interference this early

before election day and to warn us that, hey, this is coming. Hey, be on guard. And maybe question what you see online a little bit more. And don't be so quick to repost something if it looks kind of even like 10% weird. So we've kind of learned in those regards, just like there's awareness. But obviously, I wouldn't say we're 100% there yet. I don't know if anyone is really 100% there on cybersecurity, though. Right. You spoke to an official who voiced concerns about how the Trump campaign could use the real threat of election interference to its advantage. So tell us a little bit more about what he said. Yeah, yeah. So I spoke with Jake Braun. He is a former Obama campaign official who he was there when even their campaign was

facing attacks from China. And typically back then, China was just interested in espionage. But he was really concerned about the potential, especially from the Trump campaign, to maybe use even suspected Iranian hacking to their advantage, right? We know that President Trump is already kind of in disarray in the last few weeks since Biden dropped out. VP Harris stepped in and he's kind of been looking for a way forward. And he has been going on this message of saying, you know, the election could be rigged if I don't win. We all know what happened. You could see a world

where if we get closer to November, if it's not going the former president's way in his mind, then he could easily go, hey, it was the Iranians. Oh, hey, you saw a glitch in a voting machine. Probably the hackers. They got me, they can get you, right? And so there's a deep fear that this can be weaponized in the next few weeks. And we have an electorate that already has so much distrust in our electoral system for various reasons, legitimate or not. So it doesn't really take much to even like pour a little bit of gasoline and burn those further. That was my conversation with Sam Sabin, cybersecurity reporter at Axios. Thanks for that, Josie.

That's the latest for now. We'll get to some headlines in a moment. But if you like our show, make sure to subscribe and share it with your friends. We'll be back to some headlines. Headlines. World leaders are bracing themselves for escalating tensions in the Middle East as they wait for Iran's expected retaliatory attack on Israel. This comes after Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini vowed revenge on Israel after the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. Haniyeh was killed in Tehran late last month after attending the inauguration of Iran's new president. Officials from Jordan and Saudi Arabia

have met with Iranian leaders in recent days to discuss the need to de-escalate tensions. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Monday that the Pentagon sent a missile submarine to bolster Israel's defenses, along with other military reinforcements. A new report from the Associated Press found that more than 100 pregnant patients who needed an abortion have been denied emergency health care since the fall of Roe. The report cites several federal complaints from patients who were turned away from hospitals despite having an ectopic pregnancy. Ectopic pregnancies occur when a fetus grows outside of the uterus and cannot be carried to term. One woman in Texas said doctors handed her a pamphlet about miscarriage and told her to, quote, let nature take its course when she went to the hospital. Doctors eventually terminated her pregnancy days

later, but by then one of her fallopian tubes had ruptured. Even though several states have passed strict abortion bans since 2022, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, dictates that hospitals must provide abortion care when the patient's life is at risk. But medical providers are hesitant to do so in states like Texas, where they face up to 99 years in prison for violating the state's abortion ban. State officials have challenged EMTALA in court and even taken it up to the Supreme Court, but the justices sent the case back to a lower court. On Monday, Ukraine's top military commander said his forces had taken control of more than 1,000 square kilometers of Russian territory, or about 400 miles. This marked the first time Ukraine's military publicly acknowledged its week-long campaign

in Russia's Kursk region, which borders northeastern Ukraine. Russia has scrambled to respond to Ukraine's attack, which is the largest on Russian soil since World War II. During a televised meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin and his top officials Monday, the acting governor of the Kursk region said more than two dozen towns and villages were under Ukrainian control and that more than 120,000 people had fled. During the meeting, Putin ordered Russian troops to kick the enemy out and insisted Moscow would still meet all of its goals for its war in Ukraine.

And apparently MTV still plays music videos and awards folks for them. On Monday, the network said it would postpone its annual Video Music Awards ceremony to avoid conflicting with the presidential debate. The VMAs were originally scheduled for Tuesday, September 10th. That's the same day Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are set to square off on ABC for their first and so far only debate. The VMAs will now be held Wednesday, September 11th in Long Island. What a choice. MTV also announced some of the performers at this year's ceremony.

They include Sabrina Carpenter, Camila Cabello, and Chapel Roan. So quaint. Quaint? Of VMAs on the September 11th in Long Island? I mean, come on. No, not the September 11th part. Not the September 11th part. Just the general VMAs. Just the fact that they're still in existence, you mean.

Yeah, it feels so nostalgic. Throwback Thursday or Tuesday. I bet that's what they're going for. Whatever today is. And those are the headlines. One more thing before we go. Next week, we are going all out for the Democratic National Convention here at Crooked Media. We're giving Friends of the Pod subscribers access to a ton of behind-the-scenes content and community events, including a DNC subscriber live chat, a new subscriber-exclusive segment featuring John, John, Tommy, and Dan,

four back-to-back ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, recapping the biggest convention news of the night and brand-new episodes of Inside 2024 and Polar Coaster. It is going to be a hell of a week for content. And as a bonus, we'll have a Democratic Party nominee by the end. So it's a pretty good deal. Get all of our exclusive DNC content and more when you subscribe to Friends of the Pod. Head to cricut.com slash friends to sign up now. That's all for today.

If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, prepare yourself for the weird September 11th VMAs, and tell your friends to listen. And if you are into reading and not just about the Biden administration's war on junk fees like me, well, today's also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Traebell Anderson. I'm Jessie Duffy Rice. And see you in hell, chatbots. Well, now hold on. I won't be there. No, I'm not going to be there either. I'm definitely not going to be in that hell. I'm not going to be in that. I'm going to be in a whole other hell.

That's too much. Well, today is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Bill Lantz. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. We had production help today from Michelle Alloy, Ethan Oberman, John Milstein, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our showrunner is Erica Morrison, and our executive producer is Adrienne Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gileard and Kshaka.