US national security adviser says China targeting 2020 presidential election

US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien says Chinese hackers are targeting American election infrastructure.

Robert O'Brien says the goal of Chinese hackers is to have Donald Trump lose office in November. Picture: AFP

US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien said on Sunday (Monday AEST) that Chinese hackers were targeting American election infrastructure in the lead up to the November 3 presidential election, making a new claim about the level of Beijing’s activity in the election.

“China, like Russia, like Iran — they’ve engaged in cyberattacks and phishing and that sort of thing with respect to our election infrastructure, with respect to websites,” Mr O’Brien told CBS.

He also said China was “absolutely trying to access Secretary of State websites,” and the goal is “to see the President lose”.

Mr O’Brien’s comments were met with scepticism by other officials familiar with the matter.

While China has an active interest in the election, the US doesn’t currently have intelligence showing that Beijing is directly trying to hack election-related systems, the officials said.

What Mr O’Brien described, if true, would resemble Russian activity during the 2016 campaign and hasn’t previously been asserted publicly by the government.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence referred a request for comment to the National Security Council, which declined to comment. China has denied that it targets the US with cyberattacks.

On Friday, Bill Evanina, the director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, released a statement saying that the US intelligence community had assessed that Russia is engaged in a broad effort to damage Democrat Joe Biden’s bid for the presidency by trying to influence public debate and perception.

The statement also said that China prefers that Mr Trump, a Republican, not win re-election, though it largely described public-facing activity rather than covert interference, as in Russia’s case.

Democrats have pointed to the statement to argue that foreign activity with regards to the presidential election isn’t equal, and that Russia is seeking to reprise the aggressive role it played in 2016 by using a variety of cyber-enabled means to harm the Democratic nominee.

“Russia is actively 24/7 interfering in our election,” Democrat House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Sunday on CNN. “They did so in 2016, and they are doing so now.”

In July, Mr Evanina said in a different statement that unnamed adversaries “seek to compromise our election infrastructure, and we continue to monitor malicious cyber actors trying to gain access to US state and federal networks, including those responsible for managing elections.”

Russia interfered in the 2016 election to boost Mr Trump’s campaign and harm Democrat nominee Hillary Clinton, according to US intelligence agencies. That finding was corroborated by former special counsel Robert Mueller and a bipartisan report by the Senate intelligence committee. Russia has denied the attacks.

As part of that operation, US officials believe Russian hackers probed the election systems in all 50 states and successfully broke into at least one voter registration database in Illinois. There is no evidence that any votes were altered or that vote tabulations were at risk, officials have repeatedly said, and states and federal agencies have taken a variety of steps since 2016 to improve election cybersecurity.

Speaking last month at an Brookings Institution event, Chris Krebs, the top cybersecurity official at the Department of Homeland Security, said that officials had seen scant interest from foreign adversaries in election infrastructure during this election cycle.

“We absolutely have better visibility across the networks, and we’re just not seeing that same level of activity that we saw in 2016,” Mr Krebs said.

The Wall Street Journal