When Donald Trump called on Vladimir Putin to help find Hillary Clinton’s “missing” emails late last month, he pissed off the wrong group of people.
On Wednesday night, at the Black Hat hackers conference in Las Vegas, the first gathering of Hackers for Hillary was convened.
The idea to organize cybersecurity professionals and get them to work for Hillary Clinton’s election campaign was in the works for more than a month before, says Jake Braun, CEO of Cambridge Global Advisors and co-organizer of the event. But it didn’t gain steam until the Republican presidential nominee made his infamous statement.
“Maybe 12 people had RSVP’d until then,” Braun said. “It went through the roof after that. It really helps when you have Donald Trump giving Russia a pass on hacking our democracy.”
Roughly 60 security professionals attended the fundraiser, which raised around $30,000. The event was held at an upscale Mexican restaurant in the Mandalay Bay hotel. The choice of venue had nothing to do with Trump’s stated plan to erect a wall along the country’s southern border, Braun admits.
“I wish I was that clever,” he said. “Honestly, it was just the least expensive venue I could find.”
More important than the money was the opportunity to inspire normally apolitical cybersecurity professionals to get involved, said Jeff Moss, the event’s other co-conspirator.
“It’s risky and will probably hurt my reputation,” said Moss, the founder of Black Hat and DefCon, the world’s largest gathering of hackers. (Moss is a legend in cybersecurity circles; his hacker handle is Dark Tangent.)
“But I don’t know how you can influence policy makers and have a seat at the table if you don’t participate. We can either get involved in policy or policy can be done to us. We can either embrace it or be passive about it, but it’s going to happen one way or the other.”
The fact that both the DNC and Hillary’s campaign suffered hacks in recent weeks was not really a factor in spurring interest, Moss said. This isn’t the first time a political campaign has been hacked. But the way the data was leaked in an attempt to embarrass Trump’s opponents definitely added fuel to the hackers’ ire.
“When the campaigns were hacked in 2004 and 2008 and 2012, the FBI had to come to the campaigns and say: ‘Look, we noticed these intrusions,’” he said. “But it never made it to the front of the newspapers. WikiLeaks and others trying to meddle with the election – that’s new.”
Braun said the fundraiser was really just a first step in what he hoped would be an active role for security pros in the Clinton campaign.
“The security community is very concerned because they understand how vulnerable our election equipment is, and how active Russia has been with cyber-attacks on other democracies like the Ukraine, Georgia, and Kurdistan,” he added. “Most of the general public doesn’t know that. But these people do.”
Moss says it’s high time the hacker community took a more active role in the political process.
“A lot of people in security like to complain from the sidelines,” he says. “But complaining from the sidelines will only take you so far.”
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