Intro

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/iranian-official-denies-plans-interfere-us-election-65929393

Trump asks for foreign interference

Republicans are fine with Trump’s Ukraine collusion.

Preventing foreign states from interfering with the 2020 US presidential election is a lost battle. There is no reason for any of them to stay out, and many are even incentivised to control the outcome regardless of the repercussions.

DPRK 2020

• 2020, elections, open season, DPRK and let the fat kid play.
• Incentives
  • KJU will never do better than Trump
  • Biden said a bad thing about DPRK, their analysis will be ?
  • KJU knows that anyone except Trump is a loss for KJU
• Outcomes
  • Trump wins — the Carrot
    • best: KJU gets even more,
    • worst: no change
  • Trump loses — the stick
    • If KJU did nothing, he is going to get the stick
    • If KJU did something, he is going to get the stick
  • Question: what is the stick?
    • More sanctions? Clearly not particularly motivational
    • Cyber retaliation? There’s nothing that is proportionate
    • Kinetic retaliation? Nothing is proportionate in that tinder box, and, oh yeah, nukes and icbms
    • Conclusion: there is no stick
• The US possesses no deterrent to keep KJU from unleashing Lazarus group on the 2020 elections
  • Cyber as a domain intersects with the real world at several different layers:
    • physical ICS,
    • pragmatic work personal,
    • informational,
    • cultural and social.
  • Vulnerability in the cyber domain is asymmetric, every one, every thing, every group, organization, nation, etc has a different vulnerability profile.
  • Capability in the cyber domain is roughly symmetrical, everyone gets the cyber they can afford
  • Capacity in cyber is also symmetrical, because scale is not coupled to headcount. One excellent hacker can write an exploit for a thousand mediocre hackers to use.
  • Proportional deterrence in the cyber domain is very unlikely, and ever so it is still a risk things will escalate to kinetic
  • Really, the only deterrent against operations in the cyber domain are operations outside the cyber domain
    • Diplomatic sanction don’t work against DPRK
    • Kinetic is right out,
    • Or, the US’s “defend forward”, aka preemptive attacks. Rise and kill first. Will CYBERCOM pull the plug on Lazarus? How will DPRK respond to that? That’s definitely escalatory
      • Broader point, the only deterrent against cyber in the cyber domain is preemption. Other deterrents are politics and politics by other means.
  • The decision to cyber 2020 is entirely up to DPRK decision makers. And China.
    • China, I suspect, wants a more stable president to deal with. It is hard enough making a 40 year plan without reality flipping about just because someone ate a shrimp cocktail after midnight and now has heart burn while watching Fox News at 2am.
  • The US has zero influence against a hostile state that has the means, the motives and the opportunity to cause them harm.
    • The old war maxim “the enemy gets a vote” is, in this case, “only the enemy gets a vote”
• The question is then, why wouldn’t KJU go full spectrum cyber on 2020? Follow up, what is the range of real capabilities the Lazarus group could bring to bare? They have history and they have had ample time to study Russian methods from Georgia, Ukraine, US, France, Britain, etc etc. Wide range of real campaigns to study, including very recent ones in their target country.
  • Known set of capabilities and established MOs
  • Does not appear to have an American whisperer, so they will probably misunderstand

What does Lazarus 2020 look like?

• Lazarus has a particular style
  • “retro rm -rf chic”
  • Sony, dumping email spools
  • Manual, crude, determined and with mission.
  • Guess is they’ll be loud and simple.
• Russia was voluminous, attempted subtly, had a lot of resources involved, ran multiple concurrent independent operations.

https://twitter.com/kevincollier/status/1138963156078870529?s=21

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