America’s adversaries might have a stake in
the 2020 vote. Trump, for instance, speaks well
of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un while
deepening tensions with Iran by withdrawing
the U.S. from a nuclear deal. He has also
engaged China in a trade war.
But some experts are skeptical that those
countries will use hacking to try to boost a
particular candidate — or to influence the
election at all. Much of their hacking has been
tied to more narrow national interests.
China, for instance, has so far used its cyber
capabilities for the purposes of espionage
and intellectual property theft and to further
its goal of challenging the U.S. role as a
global economic superpower. The Justice
Department in 2014 charged five Chinese
military hackers with siphoning secrets from
major American corporations.
Iranian hackers have attacked dozens of
banks and a small dam outside New York
City and, more recently, sought to pilfer
sensitive information from hundreds of
universities, private companies and American
government agencies.
North Korea tends to focus its efforts on
defectors, academics and others with a hostile
relationship to the country, said Jung Pak, a
Brookings Institution expert. It hacked Sony
Pictures Entertainment and released the private
emails of its executives in apparent retaliation
for a Hollywood comedy that mocked Kim.
“We haven’t really seen politically motivated
attacks where they try to sway elections,”
said Matt Ha, a research associate at the
Foundation for Defense of Democracies.