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Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections 2020
Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections is a 2020 American television documentary film made by Ish Entertainment, Blumhouse Television and HBO Documentary Films. It looks at the American election system and how it can be targeted by foreign cyberwarfare efforts, especially during the 2016 presidential election. The program includes footage of hackers attending the DEF CON conference as they try to assess the safety of electronic voting machines.
HBO Documentary Films distributed the film on March 26, 2020.
An Emmy nomination followed in 2021 for Outstanding Investigative Documentary.
The documentary shows how a hacking operation affected the 2016 presidential election, using an exclusive interview with a hacker named CyberZeist. CyberZeist accessed the Alaska Division Of Elections' vote tabulation computer system on 6 and 7 November 2016, and again on election day, 8 November 2016. This attack happened just weeks after the Alaska Division Of Elections admitted Russian hackers had tried to perform a similar act.
A well-known elections cybersecurity expert in the film, Harri Hursti, found that most hackers place various software tools across many parts of a computer system. Even if someone deletes the hard drive, these tools remain accessible. CyberZeist told Hursti, “I’ll go under their radar even if they are 24/7 monitoring it [the vote-counting server].” During his review of the Alaska Division Of Elections’ servers, Hursti saw that CyberZeist had full access to read or write any file, including system files. That means CyberZeist could have installed vote-stealing software which may still be present, waiting for a signal to activate. As shown in Kill Chain, attackers might not aim to alter election outcomes directly but instead seek to damage democracy and undermine public trust in the process.
Crew
- Director
- Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels, Sarah Teale
- Producer
- Simon Ardizzone, Russell Michaels, Sarah Teale, Michael Hirschorn, Jessica Antonini
- Cinematography
- Matt Porwoll
Details
- Production
- Blumhouse Atomic, HBO Documentary Films, Ish Entertainment