U.S. Elections 2024

The Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council is dedicated to identifying foreign malign influence and information manipulation targeting the 2024 U.S. election. On this page, you will find our compiled research and reporting on 2024 U.S. election threats, as well as links to our historical U.S. case studies. The DFRLab’s nonpartisan election coverage complements that of the wider Atlantic Council, whose compiled commentary and analysis you can find at Elections 2024: America’s role in the world.

Spotlight

Latest Research

November 2024

Russian milbloggers employed nuclear scare tactics following Ukrainian incursion of Kursk

by Iryna Adam, Roman Osadchuk

Telegram channels claimed that Ukraine intended to attack Russian nuclear power plants, then exploited a site visit by IAEA Director Rafael Grossi
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November 2024

Seizing the Win: Navigating Competition and Hands-on Learning through Cyber 9/12 

by Safa Shahwan Edwards, Emerson Johnston

Competitors and judges from the inaugural Cyber 9/12 Strategy Challenge in Costa Rica share their perspectives on how to leverage teamwork and interdisciplinary skills to address tomorrow’s cyber challenges.
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November 2024

Pro-Hezbollah accounts orchestrated digital smear campaign against Lebanese journalists

by Ali Chenrose, Jad Hani, Jad Safwan

The X campaign sought to discredit five Lebanese media workers with edited media, gender-based violence, and threats
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November 2024

The Role of Data in Improving Cyber Insurance Pricing

by Alphaeus Hanson

In order to improve cybersecurity through cyber insurance, the private sector should aggregate cyber incident data to inform risk models and in turn, more accurately price cyber premiums.
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November 2024

Investigation: Chinese bot network is amplifying Russian disinformation about the US election

Videos claiming election fraud in the final hours of the US election, exhibiting multiple indicators of connections to “Operation Overload”
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November 2024

What to expect from foreign threat actors following the 2024 US election

by Dina Sadek, Max Rizzuto

US intelligence community on high alert for the intensification of influence operations in the days and weeks following the 2024 US election
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November 2024

Trends in China’s US election interference illustrate its longer game

by Kenton Thibaut

Chinese malign information operations focusing on down-ballot Senate and House races rather than favoring a particular presidential candidate
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November 2024

Sockpuppet network impersonating Americans and Canadians amplifies pro-Israel narratives on X

by Ali Chenrose

A network of accounts on X using stolen and possibly AI-generated images coordinated to engage with accounts supportive of Israel
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November 2024

Take the Bribe but Watch Your Back: Why Russia Imprisoned a Security Officer for Taking Cybercriminal Payoffs 

by Justin Sherman

Russia imprisoned a security service officer for taking bribes from cybercriminals—showing not a willingness to crack down on cybercrime, but instead just how much the Kremlin wants to maintain its cybercrime protection racket.
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In-Depth Reports

September 2024

Mythical Beasts and Where to Find Them: Mapping the Global Spyware Market and its Threats to National Security and Human Rights

by Jen Roberts, Trey Herr, Nitansha Bansal, and Nancy Messieh, with Emma Taylor, Jean Le Roux, and Sopo Gelava

The Mythical Beasts project pulls back the curtain on the connections between 435 entities across forty-two countries in the global spyware market.
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September 2024

Mythical Beasts and Where to Find Them

by Jen Roberts, Trey Herr, Nitansha Bansal, and Nancy Messieh, with Emma Taylor, Jean Le Roux, and Sopo Gelava

Mythical Beasts and Where to Find Them: Mapping the Global Spyware Market and its Threats to National Security and Human Rights is concerned with the commercial market for spyware and provides data on market participants.
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June 2024

User in the Middle: An Interoperability and Security Guide for Policymakers

by Maia Hamin, Alphaeus Hanson

When technologies work together, it benefits users and the digital ecosystem. Policymakers can advance interoperability and security in tandem by understanding how each impacts the other.
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June 2024

“Reasonable” Cybersecurity in Forty-Seven Cases: The Federal Trade Commission’s Enforcement Actions Against Unfair and Deceptive Cyber Practices

by Isabella Wright, Maia Hamin

The FTC has brought 47 cases against companies for unfair or deceptive cybersecurity practices. What can we learn from them?
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Generative art showing paper airplanes flying over Red Square in Moscow.
June 2024

Another battlefield: Telegram as a digital front in Russia’s war against Ukraine

In this new report, the DFRLab investigates the role of Telegram in Russia since the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine
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April 2024

Markets Matter: A Glance into the Spyware Industry

by Jen Roberts, Trey Herr, Emma Taylor, Nitansha Bansal

The Intellexa Consortium is a complex web of holding companies and vendors for spyware and related services. The Consortium represents a compelling example of spyware vendors in the context of the market in which they operate—one which helps facilitate the commercial sale of software driving both human rights and national security risk.
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An image of a GPU overlaid with a computer terminal showing the results of an nmap command, a network scan.
February 2024

Hacking with AI

by Maia Hamin, Stewart Scott

Can generative AI help hackers? By deconstructing the question into attack phases and actor profiles, this report analyzes the risks, the realities, and their implications for policy.
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Smartphone with the app from TikTok on the flags of the USA and China. (Source: Reuters)
February 2024

TikTok: Hate the Game, Not the Player

by Rose Jackson, Seth Stodder, Kenton Thibaut

How Strategic and Regulatory Confusion Around TikTok Prevent an Effective National Security Response
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January 2024

Design Questions in the Software Liability Debate

by Maia Hamin, Sara Ann Brackett, and Trey Herr, with Andy Kotz

Software liability—resurgent in the policy debate since its mention in the 2023 US National Cybersecurity Strategy—describes varied potential structures to create legal accountability for vendors of insecure software. This report identifies key design questions for such regimes and tracks their discussion through the decades-long history of the debate.
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Projects

Russian soldier and helicopter

Russian War Report

As Russia’s aggression in Europe heats up, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) is keeping a close eye on Moscow’s movements across the military, cyber, and information domains.

Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker

The DFRLab’s Foreign Interference Attribution Tracker (FIAT) is an interactive, open-source database that captures allegations of foreign interference relevant to the 2024 election. This tool assesses the credibility, bias, evidence, transparency, and impact of each claim.


Election Official Handbook: Preparing for Election Day Misinformation

As part of the Election Integrity Partnership, the DFRLab has analyzed roughly four hundred cases of election-related dis- and misinformation on social media. This memo gathers the findings and issues recommendations for US election officials: they must prepare for viral falsehoods online that persist for weeks.


Dichotomies of Disinformation

Via the DFRLab’s Github: This project isolates “political disinformation campaigns.” Dichotomies of Disinformation proposes and tests a classification system built on 150 variable options. Our intent is to establish a replicable, extensible system by which widely disparate disinformation campaigns can be categorized and compared.

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