WASHINGTON –President Vladimir Putin of Russia dismisses the idea that he has the power to interfere with Tuesday's election. "Does anyone seriously think that Russia can affect the choice of the American people?" he asked during a foreign policy conference last week in the resort city of Sochi. "What, is America a banana republic? America's a great power. Correct me if I'm wrong."
America's top intelligence officials say he is highly unlikely to be able to alter the results. But they expect Russian hackers, or others, to try to disrupt the process — perhaps to help Donald Trump, but more likely to simply undercut what Putin views as America's holier-than-thou attitudes about its democratic procedures.
The Obama administration has concluded that much of the e-mail hacking that has roiled the campaign was almost certainly approved by the Russian leadership. More recent activity — including the probing of registration rolls in several states — might be the work of independent Russian hackers, it says. While no one knows what to expect before the polls close, a tight race is more susceptible to mischief.
So government agencies and commercial enterprises, including some hired by state election boards facing a determined cyberthreat for the first time, are on high alert. But they are not exactly sure what to look for. Russian hackers? Other attackers? Malware that harnesses devices to strike election infrastructure? More e-mail revelations?
Dmitri Alperovitch of CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm that found the intrusions into the Democratic National Committee's computer servers, said at a Harvard discussion that while the odds that the results could be manipulated were "minuscule," he thought hackers' ultimate goal was "to discredit the results of the election." That is the sort of activity that Russia has long carried out in Ukraine and other former Soviet states.
Federal and state officials are focusing on five possible ways to hack the election. Here is a look at their biggest concerns:
A Flood of Disclosures
(Possible, but hard to make an impact)
In an election that has already been shaken by a series of disclosures — from messages hacked by the Russians that ended up in the hands of WikiLeaks to a cache of e-mails on the computer of former Rep. Anthony Weiner that might be related to the Hillary Clinton e-mail inquiry — it is not hard to imagine a last-minute set of revelations. The question is whether they would make much difference.