Trump campaign turns to secure hardware after hacking incident

By Christopher Bing and Gram Slattery

(Reuters) – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign is now using specialized, encrypted cellphones and secure laptops in an effort to protect staff following a series of successful Iranian cyberattacks and two attempts to assassinate the former president.

The campaign recently purchased a package of these devices from Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Green Hills Software, the developer of a proprietary security-focused operating system already used by several U.S. agencies, the company’s CEO told Reuters.

The company sells a custom Android phone that comes pre-installed with its own unique operating system, eliminating most functions beyond phone calls and texting while also implementing additional security controls.

Although Green Hills Software issued a press release on October 1 about the campaign deal, the development received virtually no press attention.

The company’s president and CEO, Dan O’Dowd, said he approached the campaign through shared contacts and offered his company’s technology. “Ensuring the integrity of the democratic process is critical,” O’Dowd said in the statement.

A Trump campaign spokesperson declined to comment. The campaign’s top brass recently made significant improvements to the security of its hardware, said a person familiar with campaign matters who spoke on condition of anonymity, although he did not know which vendor had been chosen.

When asked about IT security at the Harris campaign, spokesperson Morgan Finkelstein said, “Generally speaking, we have robust cybersecurity measures in place and staff are trained to be vigilant against potentially malicious content.”

The current plan to retool Trump’s campaign devices follows months of an Iranian cyber espionage campaign that stole communications and internal documents. The decision to update security measures was also motivated by physical threats to Trump, fearing that hackers or spies could surveil employees and use that information to personally target individuals, another person familiar with the matter said.

In an interview, O’Dowd explained that a core group of campaign staffers are already using the devices, which are more resistant to remote cyberattacks.

“No vulnerabilities have been published about our operating system,” he added. Phones work on an isolated channel, where only devices on the same plane can communicate with each other. Devices also use end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication by default – two measures widely recommended by cybersecurity experts.

The Iranian hacking group responsible for compromising the campaign earlier this summer, dubbed APT42 in the security research community, is known for deploying sophisticated malware to cell phones that can record conversations and remotely activate camera recording. Notably, APT42 is also known to spy on targets who are then physically threatened by Iranian intelligence-related operatives, Reuters previously reported, based on a series of attacks on Iranian dissidents.

O’Dowd declined to discuss how many devices were purchased by the campaign or the overall cost, explaining that pricing often depends on a variety of factors and can differ between customers.

The campaign also purchased custom, stripped-down laptops that are inaccessible over the Internet to outside attackers, he said. Laptops reflect the same approach as cell phones, with limited functionality, but they also offer a way to access a shared set of files and records so that team members can collaborate remotely in a shared but isolated computer environment.

O’Dowd said the technology has previously been used by legal teams working on sensitive court cases where they wanted to keep certain client files separate and secure.

Green Hills Software is a federal contractor that sells its operating system to several military branches, where it is integrated into a variety of platforms, including weapons systems, according to publicly accessible government procurement records.

O’Dowd said the company’s laptop is also used by FBI field offices.

(Reporting by Christopher Bing, Gram Slattery and Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Chris Sanders and Jonathan Oatis)