| Greetings, newsletter readers. This is Kartikay Mehrotra. You may know my byline from Bloomberg's coverage of all things legal, including immigration, data privacy and environmental deregulation. I recently joined the Bloomberg Technology team in San Francisco to report on cyber-issues and election security. If you have any thoughts or tips, me email is linked below or try me at @KartikayM on Twitter.I've been speaking to local elections officials almost every day for the last few months to understand how they're preparing for primaries and the U.S. presidential election. One of them, Lori Gummow, county clerk in Winnebago County, Illinois, says every day is a new adventure: "I'm not a security expert, but there are many days when I have to play one. Every day I walk in here and think, what's the big surprise going to be today."
Fear of the unknown is keeping election officials up at night as they prepare for the 2020 presidential election. From the Department of Homeland Security to voting system manufacturers and all the way down to county and municipal elections administrators, there's almost universal consensus that cyber-attacks on the American electorate are imminent, and they won't mimic the 2016 hacks. That's about all anyone is sure of, which has everyone, including Gummow, spooked.
Enter Russia: Vladimir Putin's gang of cybersleuths remain the greatest threat to American election integrity and destabilization of the democratic process. But pointing the finger back at groups with ties to the Kremlin has become tougher. Our own Alyza Sebenius reported last week that a Russian group, known as Turla, successfully hacked their Iranian counterparts to acquire a new set of tools. So, not only do some Russian hackers have new toys to play with, but when they use those weapons it looks like Iran is the one dropping malware, according to the American and British cyber-intelligence agencies.
For the record, Russia and Iran denied the report. A Russian spokesman described the findings as an attempt to ''drive a wedge'' between Russia and Iran.
You may wonder why that matters. After all, the objective for DHS, Gummow and everyone in between should be to keep Russians, Iranians and anyone else who doesn't belong in the American election apparatus out of it, right? Kinda.
Attribution is crucial to identifying key vulnerabilities in elections systems. Imagine if officials didn't know who hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016, or who was after Illinois or Florida before the presidential election. Those facts were fundamental to Robert Mueller's investigation into 2016 interference and vulnerabilities in the election system.Hopefully, attribution is also shaping foreign policy to deter those same nation-states from trying to interfere in the future.
The report from last week indicates that hackers are getting better at covering their tracks and intelligence agencies are being met with greater opacity when attempting to retrace criminals' cyberfootsteps. Iran is indeed becoming increasingly active in the realm of cyberwarfare. Earlier this month, Microsoft reported that hackers linked to the Iranian government targeted U.S. presidential campaigns, government officials and journalists. They were largely unsuccessful.
If the allied Five Eyes government intelligence services ultimately devolve into a space where they can't agree on the culprit of a hack, the geopolitical ramifications could be the equivalent of a military attack with no understanding of who fired the missile. Even worse would be the erosion of trust in the American electoral system. For now, authorities insist we havenothing to worry about.
"We want to send a clear message that even when cyber actors seek to mask their identity, our capabilities will ultimately identify them," according to a joint statement issued by British and American intelligence agencies. -- Kartikay Mehrotra | 
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