If you set out to intentionally design a perfect target for a cyberattack, you couldn’t do much better than the Liberal Party of Canada’s leadership contest now under way.
Foreign adversaries like Russia and China are well incentivized to try: The political impact of a well-organized ransomware attack against the party or one of the candidates (to take just one example of the kind of attack that could be launched) could be enormous – not necessarily in tilting the scales toward one candidate or another, but in delegitimizing the winner. A prime minister with a credibility problem helps Canada’s adversaries.
That’s a feature not a bug.
