Microsoft warns of escalating cyber threats ahead of US presidential election

Shafaq News/ On Monday, Microsoft unveiled cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns from foreign adversaries in the run-up to the US presidential election that go beyond tactics deployed four years ago.

“I do think people should expect that the noise levels, the sort of chaos and confusion, will continue through Election Day and then most certainly in the days after,” Ginny Badanes, the general manager of Microsoft’s Democracy Forward program, told the Politico magazine.

Microsoft’s election defense efforts focus on these foreign adversaries because they “have the funding to be persistent over time” and are willing to “pick up on whatever narratives are working, regardless of the source,” the magazine quoted.

Politico stated, “Since 2020, attempts by tech companies and academic researchers to crack down on American-made disinformation have drawn accusations of censorship from Republicans. And some tech firms, chiefly Elon Musk-owned X, have pulled back on their efforts to police political content this election cycle.”

For its part, Microsoft has tried to carve out a different lane. “What you’ll find is we’ve been more vocal about what we’ve seen this cycle than any year before,” Badanes said. “We feel like the American public deserves more information, not less.”