alt.hn

6/2/2026 at 2:28:24 AM

U.S. midterms have a cyber problem, but it's not at the ballot box

 https://blog.checkpoint.com/exposure-management/the-2026-u-s-midterms-have-a-cyber-problem-but-its-not-at-the-ballot-box/

by gnabgib

6/2/2026 at 2:54:49 AM

It's interesting to have a conversation with people over politics these days, sometimes it's like people don't live in the same reality anymore. It's probably not far from the truth.

To a first approximation, nothing is verified, people see a number on social media as a proxy for accuracy. Even if it's completely wrong, it doesn't matter because you're among friends.

Memes let insane ideas spread like a virus, the only criterion is whether they can survive against other memes. Grounding in reality is an idea's death sentence, because of the bullshit asymmetry principle.

And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.

I shudder to think what this means for elections. At least I appreciate that the article attaches some numbers to it.

by avaer

6/2/2026 at 3:24:27 AM

These sorts of things did happen before the internet though. Think of the Cultural Revolution in China started by revolutionary university students.

Mass printed pamphlets was the original meme. The more things change the more they stay the same.

by elcritch

6/2/2026 at 4:33:00 AM

True. But in the physical world, ideas (or memes, if you will) are bound to people and can only survive, if the carrier survives. The idea of curing headaches with striking your head with a hammer does not spread, because the carrier dies. On the interweb, that connection is no longer there. An idea is independent and can spread without direct human involvement. We are like a tundra species finding itself in a rainforest: completely unprepared, lacking both immunity and the ability to keep up with the environment as it changes.

by belZaah

6/2/2026 at 3:50:16 AM

This is why any totalitarian regime bans printed pamphlets.

by petre

6/2/2026 at 4:14:54 AM

Uh yea you used to need a license to run a printing press, there’s quite a few that were operated in secret

by jazzyjackson

6/2/2026 at 4:15:10 AM

[dead]

by decremental

6/2/2026 at 3:56:40 AM

For me, what really drove home how bad it is is that I know otherwise normal people in real life who think that many Haitian immigrants are eating people's pets. To even find that plausible there was a lot of racist misinformation they needed to have already internalized to the point that "don't live in the same reality" seems very accurate.

Though one bit of hope is that for me politics has never been that much different. My first foray into real political discussion was people in high school trying to convince me global warming wasn't real or that allowing gay marriage was a slippery slope to bestiality. Even back in 2008, before social media was what it is today, there was still tons of misinformation.

by tdb7893

6/2/2026 at 4:16:19 AM

[dead]

by decremental

6/2/2026 at 5:34:25 PM

We've seen what it means for elections. Donald Trump was elected while claiming "Haitians are eating your pets and dogs" among tons of other absolutely insane things. The conservative party fought a war against education and they won resoundingly. The US is a deeply stupid and ignorant and, now especially, corrupt country.

by tstrimple

6/2/2026 at 9:34:53 AM

Yet all you hear in this forum are voices against regulation for the platforms.

by thefz

6/2/2026 at 3:12:45 AM

> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.

This was always true, right? With enough $, you can employ N writers. But the constant factor is smaller than it once was.

by loeg

6/2/2026 at 3:20:36 AM

There were times and places in history where truth was valued, respected, and rewarded.

You could not employ N writers even if you had the money, because there were not enough good writers. And they needed to care about remaining adjacent to reality, or their reputation would (rightfully) be ruined as a fraud. Things were slow enough that the average person could see that they were being bullshat. These were the golden ages of human progress.

It's not the world we live in today.

by avaer

6/2/2026 at 3:29:15 AM

The writers didn't need to be "good" for this kind of work.

by loeg

6/2/2026 at 3:18:23 AM

Only for relatively low values of N. It’s really difficult to scale organizations up and down for election cycles.

Historically you’d quickly reach a point where each additional writer was more expensive than the last.

by Retric

6/2/2026 at 5:36:45 PM

They aren't scaled down between election cycles. The media ecosystem is almost fully captured by the billionaire class. We've seen directly how they change coverage and policies tilting things. Fox News never shut down between elections. They are always in campaign mode and the money keeps rolling in.

by tstrimple

6/2/2026 at 5:48:18 PM

That’s the low N I was talking about.

As long as you can use those writers to operate a business near profitably then they are really cheap, but FOX can’t profitably employ 100,000 writers.

by Retric

6/2/2026 at 11:15:20 AM

I recently watched a film about Umberto Eco, Umberto Eco: A Library of the World (2022). (It has an eerie sense of “last words” from the “maestro” of letters as the film was produced after his death).

I’m therefore unsure who to credit with the assemblage or arching themes. Nevertheless, one is about the internet. I perceived in his words a duality—-the internet is “limitless memory” as well as “lost memory”. And not just the immediate connotation of repository of lost ideas, but in the sense we as human beings, with the Internet at our fingertips, are losing our memory to it.

Turning this idea around in my mind I imagined such a thing as _Instagram Brain_, where your memory contains only the last “bird on a branch”. (Reflecting, I watch a lot of woodworking and furniture making videos, and I can only remember the last one.)

Now some of my intellectual interests intrude on this infinite semiotic chain. Adding M.Eco’s imaginary conditions, where more information than we’ve ever had access to somehow becomes less useful, the image of the internet as a “complete graph” of knowledge comes to my mind’s eye. What a tangle. Everything connected to everything else—-numinous and beyond comprehension. (I wonder what M. Eco would have made of Chat technology? More’s the pity.)

And finally I get to the political point. By comparison the film gave my imagination a sidelong image of politics. What if, in this stage of the digital revolution, we are all striving to find some mental refuge from the mass-complete-graph (and Instagram Brain): a little corner of HN where colleagues warn each other about this or that dangerous virus or zero-day. A daytime dose of enervating 24h news for the 65+ crowd.

Like this. And more. I wonder at the American two party system and today’s political divide. (The president is literally calling the Democratic Party “traitors”. What a cockup.)

A hypothesis forms: partisanship (as a “function”) makes a tearing bifurcation of the “complete graph” of social knowledge and culture. This is our nations’s social immunity in action. We’ve reached some limit of the social-mind’s capacity to be so highly interconnected, and a function is tearing through everything faster than we can comprehend the individual parts.

Sure, It’s just a fanciful idea. The furthest extent of a Chain of Semiotic reasoning before I’m bored. Maybe the result is a false idea (short of “belief” since I know it’s hypothetical). Still, some people walk away from the computer (read internet, or whatever mass media which produces “Instagram Brain” effects) in full faith, belief and without a doubt, because they “did their research”.

Scientists and other learned individuals might balk at my subjects and turns of reason. Don’t take it literally, but poetically. If I have been at all successful your mind’s eye might glimpse a vision where we Americans, as a people, are not so far apart as it might seem. We are suffering through a black turn of the Digital Revolution, and rather than, as a group, dividing into a million opinions we have split only in two. LOL.

https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/14229908

by xtiansimon

6/2/2026 at 5:33:23 AM

Bet on your beliefs, and the highly liquid prediction markets make that feasible

Conversing about politics has been a fool’s errand for a very long time in the US, practically this whole century so far. It has zero benefit except solidifying that you have the same the value system as people that already agree with you, or who can pretend to.

The parties have failed in their primary goal of winning friends and influencing people, only rapidly losing affiliation in favor of partyless while the actual partisans think there is going to be a koolaid colored wave of support for a decade straight, seemingly mentally incapable of noticing absolutely nothing has changed or will change in the composition of seats.

Focus on what you can control, if your view of reality is more accurate, whether you want the accurate view or not, don't worry about discussing, just trade it.

by yieldcrv

6/2/2026 at 11:30:01 AM

> Bet on your beliefs, and the highly liquid prediction markets make that feasible.

Why? Insiders are rich enough as it is.

> Conversing about politics has been a fool’s errand for a very long time in the US, practically this whole century so far.

Other people sharing their perspectives and stories is a big reason I'm no longer a Republican.

> ...if your view of reality is more accurate, whether you want the accurate view or not, don't worry about discussing, just trade it.

This assumes markets are fair.

by paulryanrogers

6/2/2026 at 3:17:22 PM

> Other people sharing their perspectives and stories is a big reason I'm no longer a Republican.

wow a developed pre-frontal lobe level of empathy, amazing. that isn't even a counterpoint without knowing what your affiliation became, because the whole point is that the crowd is leaving the parties. but thanks for sharing your journey.

> This assumes markets are fair.

doesn't assume that at all, it assumes I can extract value from them

by yieldcrv

6/2/2026 at 4:55:42 PM

> that isn't even a counterpoint without knowing what your affiliation became

In early 2017 I changed from Republican to Democrat.

> seemingly mentally incapable of noticing absolutely nothing has changed or will change in the composition of seats.

US Senate and House majorities have tipped over to the other party repeatedly over the past 20y. Surely that's more than 'nothing', even if not some overwhelming wave.

> wow a developed pre-frontal lobe level of empathy, amazing

Being condescending and suggesting folks are mentally incapable (in any sense) won't help you make friends or take your ideas more seriously. Unless perhaps your only goal is pumping prediction markets.

by paulryanrogers

6/2/2026 at 3:38:45 AM

> And now the tools are there for anyone to generate bullshit at a scale commensurate to their wallet.

Democratizing propaganda. Not sure the previous state of affairs where propaganda was accessible to the ruling class and their media corporations was better, it might have just seemed that way because there appeared to be less conflict when it came to them telling you what was in "your own best interest".

I do have to say though, I certainly am enjoying watching the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the prior monopoly holders on propaganda though, lashing out desperately in the face of their waning influence. They want so desperately to censor the commoners (for our own good, naturally).

by stinkbeetle

6/2/2026 at 8:24:41 AM

As the other person mentions, much of the strident political stuff one sees online is generated by foreign state actors, so not democracy. But alongside that, a significant amount is generated by content creators in other parts of the world who realized they could cash in on America's internal problems. This has been well known since the reportage on North Macedonian content farms during the 2016 election. People falsely pretending to be from your country for profit-making isn't democracy, either.

by TFNA

6/2/2026 at 4:38:40 AM

> Democratizing propaganda.

Not really. A lot of the disinformation is generated by authoritarian state actors.

by chairmansteve

6/2/2026 at 11:05:14 AM

Yeah, it's not as if the entire corporate media is a benevolent group of organizations who want to tell us the truth.

by Canada

6/2/2026 at 3:39:59 PM

Yes really. Those "authoritarian state actors" were already "generating misinformation", but even if it wasn't, the fact that it is more accessible to more people means it is democratizing.

by stinkbeetle

6/2/2026 at 4:32:34 AM

As if this polarization does anything but atomize and disenfranchise people even further. As if people cannot communicate and work together with people who aren't in the exact same cult as them are more than LARPing slaves spitting on their own equipment that shows cartoons of the other during their 24/7 of hate. As if the people and companies whose fortunes are exploding further are "gnashing their teeth".

As if people who fantasize about putting people in virtual pens (thinking of Yarvin here) give one singular fuck about you or anyone you care about.

> They want so desperately to censor the commoners (for our own good, naturally).

"the commoners", i.e. Peter Thiel gushing to Epstein about balkanization... you're getting played like a piano.

edit: I should have phrased that last bit differently, we are all getting played like a piano. Factual reality itself, which "normal" people need to survive and defend themselves against sociopaths and assorted groups, is under attack, and I suspect by many parties who don't even like each other. What they all hate honesty and open discussion.

Hence the bubbles. We're all in dimly lit clubs and just repeat stuff that originates from who knows where. We never ask. But it's just us, sticking it to "the man" who cannot possibly have his fingers in it. I'm so tired of it, and I really want that to come across :P

by customguy

6/2/2026 at 3:44:41 PM

You appear to be unhinged. After you calm down, I would be happy to overlook this thing you have written here and pretend it never happened if you would like to attempt a more rational conversation about my previous comment.

by stinkbeetle

6/2/2026 at 2:52:21 AM

>Russian-linked Doppelganger operations have systematically cloned major media infrastructure (Reuters, The Washington Post, Fox News) using lookalike domains that replicate visual design and URL structure closely enough to pass casual inspection. This purpose-built impersonation infrastructure is supported by fake personas, AI-assisted content, and paid amplification across mainstream social platforms.

Are there any live examples out there? Similar to how I like to look at scam/phishing emails to see how they work, I'm interested in seeing how sophisticated these are/are not.

by Brendinooo

6/2/2026 at 8:33:46 AM

If you want fake personas, view X on a desktop browser through Nitter, a no-bloat interface which allows you to quickly middle-click and open many new tabs. If you go through the history of accounts commenting under pundits' political tweets, you'll soon notice that many accounts claiming to be real, honest-to-goodness Americans have profile photos from This Person Does Not Exist, and their posts are clearly bot-like. The posts are often LLM-generated (before they were manually written, but with telltale mistakes the writer was from Eastern Europe or elsewhere abroad), they might repeat every few days, and they're often single-mindedly about a single issue or two that even a fanatic real human wouldn't be so fixated on.

by TFNA

6/2/2026 at 5:10:25 AM

Look at the urls on /r/conservative - they’re mostly fly by night websites. Its kind of embarassing actually.

by tmpz22

6/2/2026 at 5:55:53 AM

i know the internet has some very not-okay socially never-going-to-be-adjusted and unhinged people on it. i dont doubt that some of them actually are in /r/conservative and think they're among good company.

...but im also mostly certain that sub is heavily gamed/botted and i suppose i'd be zero percent surprised if it was moderated by some hostile annoying nation state. your comment on the types of urls that get posted there is something ive noticed too. the entire subs entire history is weird and it feels like it exists on reddit so other redditors can say "i just checked in /r/conservative and ...". effectively reinforcing political division in the same internet environment in a very weird/unnatural way.

i worked a blue collar job for a decade. worked 10 hour days with a lot of conservatives, magas even before i finally left boeing in 2021. met the whole variety of them. the ones who actually were insane, the ones who didnt want to associate with the current flavor of maga unhinged, but still wanted to disassociate from the woke left, and somehow accidentally tripped and fell and started listening to joe rogan... and also the usual middle class suburban parents who have just been conned by sinclaire owned local news. that was a ..... long decade of my life. i don't miss it, i never felt like i was among good company. but one thing i can say, is i never met a single one that used reddit back then & /r/conservative was allegedly popping off in those years. most of them called reddit idk like a "liberal shithole" or something and that was that. just seems kinda weird. above a certain age you're going to be glued to facebook/nextdoor, under that age you're probably financing a dodge ram and listening to joe rogan.. but rarely if ever were these people on reddit.

by trueno

6/2/2026 at 3:02:09 AM

> Similar to how I like to look at scam/phishing emails to see how they work, I'm interested in seeing how sophisticated these are/are not.

https://edmo.eu/publications/ai-political-influencers-the-ne...

by jruohonen

6/2/2026 at 3:14:23 AM

Are there any links to any of these Russian doppelganger propaganda sites? That seemed to just be a story about "influencers" and their AI slop.

by stinkbeetle

6/2/2026 at 3:16:32 AM

It is the world wide web so yes there should be plenty of links to those, but I do not have them.

by jruohonen

6/2/2026 at 3:24:22 AM

I did do some searching and any link I found was already dead (hence me asking here!), so it's not really helpful to say "there should be plenty of links".

by Brendinooo

6/2/2026 at 4:08:25 AM

They set up new ones, don't worry. And the propaganda is largely on brain rotting social media like tiktok and twitterx.

by petre

6/2/2026 at 4:04:03 AM

[flagged]

by reddozen

6/2/2026 at 5:07:21 AM

PBS NewsHour interviewed one of Check Point's security evangelists this evening to discuss this same report. The discussion is a bit broader in scope than this blog post.

https://youtu.be/8bG7J3mjH5s?t=71 (I linked directly to the interview, skipping the news anchor's intro.)

by kderbe

6/2/2026 at 3:51:17 AM

I feel like this may be made worse by the rise in paywalls from media companies. I understand times are difficult and they need to make money, but it’s harder to counter disinformation if only those with money can see it. Disinformation will always be free to view.

by dabinat

6/2/2026 at 3:56:08 AM

The open question of how journalists get paid is key to democracy, and still open.

by marcus_holmes

6/2/2026 at 4:04:59 AM

Many countries have free news services though. Can read BBC and so on

by boredatoms

6/2/2026 at 4:49:06 AM

BBC is state funded, so it's technically not "free."

by anonymousiam

6/2/2026 at 5:16:10 AM

Every service is somehow funded. Would you say NPR also isnt free?

by boredatoms

6/2/2026 at 4:08:02 AM

Even when journalism was free, no one read anything. Paywalls didn't make people less lazy to read articles. People are totally content mindlessly thumbing infinite scrolling apps.

If you want to fix the average Americans low information media digest we need to start by banning the "algorithm".

by reddozen

6/2/2026 at 4:26:42 AM

They’ve done this to my workplace too. We have several domains for employee-concerning content and they’ve mirrored them and placed them at the top of Google’s search results. If you’ve forgotten the URL and go to Google it, you can get phished super easily.

I can see the elderly and the tech illiterate falling for similar schemes with mirrors of the NYT, CNN, FOX, etc.

by jimbob45

6/2/2026 at 5:01:11 AM

I’m experimenting with serving different content to users based on the presence of an mTLS cert in their USB key.

The idea is that authenticated employees see the company logo but scrapers get an IIS welcome page. Prevents cloned content from showing up on squatted domains.

by elevation

6/2/2026 at 7:23:36 AM

[dead]

by jake-mullins

6/2/2026 at 3:34:53 AM

[flagged]

by Jimmc414

6/2/2026 at 4:05:53 AM

[flagged]

by strictnein

6/2/2026 at 4:28:57 AM

If you're not from Israel, Israeli companies are by definition foreign institutions to you. Pointing out a media company is owned by Chinese companies are not racism against Chinese. Same with Israel.

by raincole

6/2/2026 at 4:32:43 AM

Checkpoint isn't a media company, but do go on.

by strictnein

6/2/2026 at 4:23:34 AM

This has nothing to do with antisemitism and I shouldn’t have to say that. This is about unfair interference of a foreign power in US elections which I thought was the entire point of this post.

by Jimmc414

6/2/2026 at 4:31:36 AM

[flagged]

by strictnein

6/2/2026 at 4:37:27 AM

Do you also think the authors of this document intrinsically hate people of Russian descent or are they stating what they see as germane facts and inviting people to use their own judgment?

by Jimmc414

6/2/2026 at 5:55:28 AM

It's so insane that we are still doing this. The mask is off.

by platevoltage

6/2/2026 at 3:34:29 AM

The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will.

To be impactful you have to be a politician and that's a full-time job which lives off donations. We need more politicans, but we don't have a reward structure to support them so we have too few politicians which means the few are funded by powerful people making even fewer make the decisions.

Just to make myself clear, when I say politicians I mean someone who tries to bring politican change, not someone who works in the government making decisions.

Democracy sounds nice, but it assumes people want to participate in it: actively validate facts, find truthful information not just vote whoever promises more of what you like.

Of course on the other hand you have the european federation: they are able to make unpopular choices, but at a steep cost which ends up hurting the member states and making the general population pretty hateful of the european central government.

Governments are too big to change, but what we have doesn't work and we're probably going to be in a world of hurt as the american type democracy(japan, australia, etc) is being manipulated from all sides, federations are uncompetitive and dictatorships becoming the strongest government there is being able to accelerate faster than anyone else and becoming the defacto world power.

by himata4113

6/2/2026 at 4:12:18 AM

> I have never voted and never will.

Thank you for putting the reason at the top to disregard the rest of your post-hoc justification. Your prescriptions literally don't matter because you will never engage with the political system.

by reddozen

6/2/2026 at 11:23:35 AM

In general, people's ideas matter regardless of what they do.

by card_zero

6/2/2026 at 4:40:49 AM

I don't vote because I am uneducated enough in local politics to do so I would only be corrupting the vote and dilluting votes that are that of people who did their research.

This is an opinionated take, but voting just to vote is pointless and does more harm than good. I guess I should have positioned that at the end instead of making that the opening statement.

by himata4113

6/2/2026 at 6:43:40 AM

This used to also be my stance, but I eventually changed it on the reasoning that the "people who did their research" that I was diluting, did not in fact exist in any meaningful number. If you believe yourself to be a somewhat intelligent person, doing even a small amount of intentional research into what you are voting on puts you way ahead of the average voter on how informed you are.

by xboxnolifes

6/2/2026 at 7:21:00 AM

Have at least some conversations with people you trust, that's the bare minimum.

Saying you're uneducated in local politics is just an excuse you're making to justify your actions.

Local politics isn't filled with much drama, and probably isn't that entertaining, but that exactly the problem with global and national politics - it's all driven by dopamine.

You shouldn't vote just to vote, you should vote to make some sort of change (or not), and it's ok to be wrong in this decision. That's why democracy is great, it renews itself every X years.

by libertine

6/2/2026 at 4:05:26 AM

Everyone pushes voting and sure, you should vote if you're able, but the other half of the puzzle is you need to have good options to vote for.

Politicians are relatively low paid for the expertise we want and so many of the folks running are people looking to supplement their income with influence peddling and grift.

by 01100011

6/2/2026 at 4:41:49 AM

This is why I wrote such a strong statement I don't have anyone to vote for and looking back at the history of my country I had never had a politican I would have wanted to vote for.

by himata4113

6/2/2026 at 5:04:42 AM

Are you from the US?

by no-name-here

6/2/2026 at 5:24:39 AM

No, but previous politicians have always setup future politicians for failure and the current politicians don't want to do anything about it since it would cause them to very likely lose the future elections so instead they choose to kick the can down the road as they say. The politican system is built in a way where there can't be someone I'd be willing to vote for as they would simply lose the election therefore there wouldn't be a politician campainging for something that would gurantee them a loss. And historically is closer to "modern democracy" rather than people from a thousand years ago.

by himata4113

6/2/2026 at 4:45:33 AM

> but the other half of the puzzle is you need to have good options to vote for.

No. It's always been that you get to choose the least bad option. Unless you fall for the personality cults that sometimes develop around politicians.

by chairmansteve

6/2/2026 at 5:50:28 AM

> The problem with voting is that people are simply not engaged in politics anymore. I have never voted and never will.

Seems like you identified the problem. I'm definitely the type that thinks there is nothing salvageable from the current U.S. system that was dreamt up by a bunch of racists who thought owning other human beings was acceptable, but I also believe that voting is a form of harm reduction. The people who want to do harm vote, and they do it reliably.

by platevoltage

6/2/2026 at 4:04:36 AM

Agreed, someone should do something to fix the problem that you discussed so eloquently.

by warkdarrior

6/2/2026 at 4:44:23 AM

I've just described the current politican system there's nothing to fix, it's a reality we live in. It's nothing more than a rant.

by himata4113