Till date, there have been ‘n’ numbers of media reports claiming Russian Interference on 2016 US Polls leading to the defeat of Hillary Clinton and making Real Estate Business Tycoon Donald Trump as 45th US President.
Now, news is out that in the process of July 2018 indictment of a dozen Russian Military Intelligence officers for hacking the computers of Democrats, US Deputy Attorney General Rod J Rosenstein did agree that the Kremlin tied saboteurs were involved in influencing the US 2016 Polls to such a level that it led to defeat of Mrs. Clinton making Donald Trump take charge as US President in Jan’17.
The US Justice Department believes that Putin’s government started to influence the polls by first hacking Guccifer 2 and then the DCleaks and then the content from Wikileaks-media sourced from the New York Times.
Vladimir Putin’s intelligence started to plant anti- Clinton stories in the media thereafter by decontextualizing hacked content which created hurdles to Democrats.
At the same time, they launched hacking campaigns on the storage servers of Ms. Clinton leading them to access over 150,000 emails and documents related to electoral strategies. All this led to the downfall of Hillary in the 2016 election polls as the US populace got influenced by the social media campaigns targeted against her.
Simultaneously, the Russian intelligence favorable tactics targeting White Evangelical Protestants and Conservative Catholics led to the win of Trump in three of largest cities of United States- Detroit, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia.
It’s now open that the hacked content was stripped of its context many times before targeting Clinton in the final debate held on October 19 which is said to have influenced around 71.6 million viewers to vote against Hillary.
Therefore, it’s clear that cyber attacks can not only break a government but can also make a government by influencing the minds of the populace.
