US election: Foreign interference risk highest in final 48 hours, Microsoft president tells Senate panel

Microsoft President Brad Smith has warned that the worst kind of foreign election interference is expected in the last 48 hours of the election.

The 2024 US presidential election is taking place amid active foreign interference activities where adversarial regimes in Iran and Russia are peddling disinformation and mounting cyberattacks to harm specific campaigns.

At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, Smith said that the “most perilous moment” regarding foreign interference activities will come 48 hours before the election, according to Bloomberg.

Americans will vote to elect the 47th President of the United States on November 5. Vice President Kamala Harris of the Democratic Party is in contesting against Republican Party’s nominee Donald Trump.

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Besides Smith of Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet’s President and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker and Meta’s President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg also testified during the hearing. X (formerly Twitter), which is owned by Trump supporter Elon Musk, refused to send a representative to the hearing.

The hearing came a day after Microsoft published a report flagging Iranian and Russian foreign interference activities in the election. The report said that while Russia was primarily targeting Harris, Iran was mainly targeting Trump in various ways such as disseminating fake videos or hacking their campaigns.

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Flagging the danger of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content, Smith said that there was a “lesson to be learnt” from the Slovakian election last year in which a fake audio of one of the candidates was made viral on the internet in the run-up to voting.

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In the report released just a day before Smith’s testimony, Microsoft highlighted three incidents of Russian interference via disinformation via “videos designed to discredit Harris and stoke controversy around her campaign”.

In the first instance, a fake video showed an attack by Harris supporters on a Trump rally attendee. In the second instance, a video peddled false claims about Harris’ involvement in a hit-and-run case. In the third instance, several videos were published to discredit the Harris campaign through false content, such as circulating images of a fake billboard advancing fake claims about Harris’ policies.

Separately, Google’s Walker flagged the usage of generative AI in foreign election interference.

“We are seeing some foreign state actors experimenting with generative AI to improve existing cyber attacks, like probing for vulnerabilities or creating spear phishing emails. We see generative AI being used to more efficiently create fake websites, misleading news articles and robot social media posts,” said Walker, as per Bloomberg.