T
hey brought me in through the back door. I had been standing on the
steps of the San Francisco Mint building and staring at a heavy, gold-
painted door that was chained shut, until I was given better directions.
Once inside, I was led down a dark hallway that, like most of the 19th-century
building, was lined with crumbling brick. We turned, passed through an
ancient but still impressive vault door, and into a small room with two tables,
several journalists, and representatives from the security company Cybereason.
We were there to hack an election.
This wouldn’t be a real hack, of course. Instead, we had all stepped away from
the cybersecurity-focused RSA Conference to play a wargame in which teams
explore hypothetical ways to undermine (or to save) a US election. Think of it
like a game of Dungeons and Dragons, except with election meddling instead of
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since 2018.
RED VS. BLUE
Sam Curry, Cybereason CSO, divided us into teams. Most of us were on the Red
Team—the bad guys. We were a domestic hacking group called Kill Organized
Systems (K-OS). It’s like “chaos”—get it? But chaos wasn’t our actual goal. We
were tasked not with disrupting the election or pushing a particular candidate
over the top but rather with instilling lasting doubt about the election’s outcome
in the populace. Create enough doubt, and the election would be postponed.
