Author Archives: Ryan Duffy

Ukrainian president warns of Russian meddling in next year’s election

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Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is sounding the alarm on Russian election interference, saying his country must ready plans to fight back against Kremlin designs to sway upcoming elections. Poroshenko said he had directed the National Security and Defense Council — Ukraine’s equivalent of the U.S.’s National Security Council — to set up a meeting and devise strategies to counter Kremlin attempts to influence Ukrainian elections, which are slated for March 31.  The move mirrors one by President Donald Trump, who recently chaired an NSC election-security meeting. “Next year, we, Ukraine, and many of our partners will hold important elections that will determine the pace and quality of our development and interaction in the medium term,” Poroshenko posted on Facebook. Seats in parliament are up for election, as is the presidency. Approval ratings of the government and Poroshenko have been in the 10 to 20 percent range, sometimes edging closer to single-digit levels. Poroshenko […]

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North Korea reuses code in major hacks, researchers find

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Most of Pyongyang’s highest-profile cyberattacks over the past decade were cobbled together with bits of reused code, overlapping networking infrastructure and the indelible fingerprint of North Korean military hackers, a pair of researchers have found. North Korea has come a long way since it first emerged on the global stage as a nascent cyber threat. As it grew in power, hit new targets and conducted malicious activities, Pyongyang didn’t need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it built on previous successes, leveraging code from previous campaigns to build out future malware. After months of code analysis, Christiaan Beek and Jay Rosenberg, the two researchers, published blog posts outlining their findings, which trace reused code all the way from a DDoS attacks launched by a fledging outfit of North Korean hackers in 2009 all the way to WannaCry, one of the world’s most crippling cyberattacks launched last year by a North Korea-backed hacking group. […]

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Trump administration touts “extensive, historic” actions to secure elections

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Numerous Trump administration officials spent Thursday expounding upon the efforts the government is taking to curb Russian-linked actors’ efforts to interfere with the 2018 midterm elections. National security adviser John Bolton, for example, issued a vigorous defense of President Donald Trump’s “extensive, historic” efforts to strengthen the security of U.S. elections while offering lawmakers classified briefings on these efforts. In a rebuttal to congressional Democrats, who have criticized Trump’s election-security efforts as insufficient, Bolton asserted that National Security Council meetings on the subject in July and May were evidence of “a level of dedication and action with respect to this threat that far exceeds that of previous administrations.” In a letter to five Democratic senators, Bolton said the Trump administration is taking “unprecedented action to punish Russia for its efforts to disrupt the political and electoral processes core to American democracy and the American way of life.” The Senate Democrats had written Bolton asking the White […]

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Report: Powerful spyware used to target Amnesty International employee and Saudi activist

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An Amnesty International employee and Saudi Arabian activist were targeted with what appears to be commercial spyware only sold to governments. In a lengthy blog post released Wednesday, London-based Amnesty International revealed that a suspicious message with a malicious link was sent to an employee. Citizen Lab, a Canadian research organization, helped analyze the incident and posted its own set of findings, which corroborated Amnesty’s report. Both suggest that the malicious messages bore the marks of Pegasus, a highly sophisticated commercial spyware and exploitation tool sold by NSO Group, a secretive Israeli surveillance company that only sells its highly proprietary wares to authorized governments. In June, an Amnesty employee received a WhatsApp message in Arabic with Saudi Arabia-related content and a malicious link. Earlier this summer, a Saudi human rights activist living abroad also received SMS messages with a similar link. Neither were opened. Had the recipients clicked the links, researchers believe that they […]

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Dixons Carphone: 2017 data breach affected 10 million 

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European electronics and telecom retailer Dixons Carphone said a breach of its systems last year could have resulted in attackers accessing roughly 10 million records, including customers’ personal data. On June 13, the company first announced that its networks had been compromised by intruders, and that it was working with authorities. Since then, “we have been putting further security measures in place to safeguard customer information, increased investment in cyber security and added additional controls,” Dixons Carphone said Monday in a statement. The company revealed that although it has evidence “some” data may have been siphoned out of the company’s systems, the exfiltrated information does not include credit card or bank account details. There is also no proof any fraud has occurred because of the breach, the company said. The intruders accessed non-financial personal information, such as names, addresses and email addresses. They also accessed the records of 5.9 million […]

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Fighting Chinese cyber-espionage could cost U.S. 5G dominance

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As the U.S. government works to neutralize its Chinese counterparts’ efforts to conduct surveillance via commercial telecom products, it may unintentionally jeopardize the United States’ bid to beat China to a nationwide 5G network.   This summer, U.S. officials, policymakers and allies have cracked down on Huawei and ZTE, two large Chinese smartphone and telecommunications equipment manufacturers. The pair are believed to have a cozy relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army. Washington fears that relationship could lead Beijing to tap into equipment owned by those companies to siphon sensitive information and possibly lay the groundwork for cyberattacks.   But many industry, trade and technological experts are worried the measures may come at a steep price. The quest to upend China’s surveillance capabilities may be hurting America’s competitiveness in the race to develop and roll out 5G wireless technology. The dilemma presents the latest — and perhaps fiercest — technological showdown between Washington […]

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Russian hackers targeted 2018 reelection campaign of vulnerable Democrat

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The same outfit of Russian hackers that launched cyberattacks against U.S. targets in the 2016 presidential election appears to have targeted Sen. Claire McCaskill, a critic of Moscow and red-state Democrat who faces a tough reelection bid. The news, first reported by the Daily Beast, makes the Missouri senator the first to be named in 2018 as a target of Russian hackers. There are at least two others. Last week, Microsoft executive Tom Burt said that earlier this year, hackers associated with the GRU, the Russian intelligence agency behind cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during the 2016 presidential election, used spearphishing and fake Microsoft domains to target three candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. Burt said that the unnamed candidates “might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint as well as from an election standpoint.” McCaskill fits the bill on both counts. She serves as the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security and Government […]

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Why did Maria Butina want info on a phished civil rights group?

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Maria Butina, the Russian national accused of spying on the U.S., took a keen interest in a D.C.-based organization’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities soon after the group was hit by phishing attempts and its website was defaced with fake Islamic State messaging, according to a consultant who helped the group recover from the incident. The organization, which works on civil rights issues, was targeted through a “social engineering campaign,” said Jon Steinman, the co-founder of HillCyber, a cybersecurity consultancy. Soon afterward, Butina sent an email to the organization “asking to come meet with folks and interview them about their vulnerabilities,” said Steinman, who declined to name the group. Although the indictment against Butina centers on how she ingratiated herself with U.S. conservatives, her interest in left-leaning organizations also has been documented — the Washington Post reported that in the summer of 2017, “Butina began probing groups on the left … trying unsuccessfully to interview a D.C.-based civil rights group about […]

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Microsoft reveals first known Russian hacking attempt aimed at 2018 midterms

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The same Russian hacking group that breached the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also tried to penetrate the campaigns of several candidates running for the midterm elections, a Microsoft executive revealed for the first time Thursday. The disclosure marks the first known case of a foreign government explicitly targeting the 2018 election. Speaking on an election security panel at the Aspen Security Forum, Tom Burt, vice president for customer security and trust at Microsoft, said there had been three separate attempts to hack 2018 midterm campaigns earlier this year. Microsoft’s security team, which counts both Republican and Democratic campaigns among its clients, detected a series of spear phishing emails sent to midterm candidates. The emails paralleled similar activity from 2016 previously attributed to Russian hacking group “APT28,” also known as “Fancy Bear.” Burt declined to name the campaigns but said: “I can tell you that they were all people who, because […]

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Before taking office, Trump was told Putin ordered DNC hack, reports say

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Two weeks before assuming the office of the presidency, Donald Trump was shown highly classified intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally ordered a wave of Russian-sponsored hacking and disinformation blitzes to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. According to the New York Times, who first reported the news Wednesday, the evidence was compiled from Russian military officers’ digital footprints, intercepted by U.S. and allied intelligence agencies, as well as top-secret sources close to Putin, who told the CIA how Moscow orchestrated its digital interference operation. Speaking to CNN on Thursday morning, James Clapper confirmed that Trump was briefed on Putin’s personal involvement in Russia’s 2016 election cyberattacks, adding: “we left very highly classified written documents that laid out in more detail the evidence.” The directors of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and national intelligence, John Brennan, Michael Rogers, James Comey, and Clapper, respectively, briefed the president-elect on January 6, […]

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