Author Archives: Sean Lyngaas

Israel, UAE say they’re allies in cyberspace. They have plenty of tech power to draw upon.

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Israel and the United Arab Emirates say they are collaborating to track and block cyberthreats in a region where hacking remains rampant. For two countries that have invested heavily in offensive hacking tools in recent years, it’s a recognition that collective defense could be more effective than going it alone. The cooperation, which officials are touting just weeks after the countries normalized diplomatic relations, involves spotting hacking threats that could affect both countries and exchanging intelligence among government cybersecurity experts. “We are threatened by the same threats…because of the nature of the region because of the new relationship and because of who we are — strong economically and technologically,” Yigal Unna, head of Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, said during a webinar Thursday with his counterpart, the UAE’s Mohamed al-Kuwaiti. The two men stressed the importance of trading threat data, and floated the idea of joint cyberdefense exercises. They did not single out any foreign governments as […]

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With an eye on election interference, Facebook scrubs networks of phony Russian accounts

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Facebook on Thursday removed over 200 phony accounts and dozens of pages that originated in Russia and pumped out information on sensitive geopolitical issues targeting people from Turkey to the U.S. Facebook said it traced the fraudulent activity to either people connected with Russian military intelligence services or the Internet Research Agency, a notorious Russia-based troll farm. It’s the latest in a series of actions that Facebook has taken against suspected foreign influence operations heading into the U.S. presidential election. “While we have not seen the networks we removed today…directly target the US 2020 election, they are linked to actors associated with election interference in the US in the past, including those involved in ‘DC leaks’ in 2016,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, said in a blog post. As with another suspected Russia-based influence operation that Facebook uncovered this month, the latest activity saw operatives pose as journalists or writers in an […]

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Election cyberthreats have been ‘blocked, minimal or easily mitigated,’ federal agencies remind voters

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For the second time in a week, U.S. national security agencies have publicly reassured voters that election systems are being guarded from hacking and that the integrity of the vote is intact. The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “have not identified any threats, to date, capable of preventing Americans from voting or changing vote tallies for the 2020 elections,” the agencies said in a statement published Thursday. “[A]ttempts by cyber actors to compromise election infrastructure could slow but not prevent voting,” the agencies said, adding that any threats to date have “remained localized and were blocked, minimal or easily mitigated.” The announcement follows an advisory from the agencies on Tuesday warning that foreign actors could seize on delays in the reporting of election results to spread disinformation aimed at undermining confidence in the vote. The statements show how federal agencies, which have worked […]

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IG finds data security practices lacking at Customs and Border Protection before big hack

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The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency failed to enforce basic security practices at a contractor that was hacked last year, exposing some 100,000 individual photos of travelers, a new inspector general report has found. Some of the hacked images ended up on the dark web, but the entire episode “may damage the public’s trust in the government’s ability to safeguard biometric data,” the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general concluded in a report released Wednesday. It’s an example of how, as federal immigration and security agencies increasingly draw on biometric data for their work, the stakes for protecting that data from hackers have grown. The data collection was for a CBP pilot to use facial recognition to screen travelers at ports of entry. The project went awry when surveillance technology company Perceptics, a subcontractor, downloaded sensitive CBP data from an unencrypted device and transferred it to the company’s network, […]

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GAO criticizes rollout of two key Trump administration cyber initiatives

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In September 2018, the White House announced a new federal cybersecurity strategy to make critical infrastructure more resilient to hacking, shore up supply chains and “identify, counter, disrupt, degrade and deter behavior in cyberspace.” The ambitious document, which the White House described as the United States’ “first fully articulated cyber strategy” in 15 years, aimed to reduce the occurrence of damaging cyberattacks on U.S. interests. Two years later, a review of the strategy by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional agency, has found key gaps in the way the White House is trying to execute that plan. In the face of persistent cyber-threats from foreign powers, the Trump administration’s effort to mobilize resources to fix important U.S. security weaknesses risks coming up short without a better plan to execute the strategy, GAO said in a report published Tuesday. The National Security Council’s implementation plan for the strategy does not include […]

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FBI, CISA: Foreign actors likely to spread disinformation on election results

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U.S. national security agencies said on Tuesday that foreign actors and cybercriminals could seize on delays in the reporting of election results to spread disinformation aimed at undermining confidence in the vote. Those adversaries could peddle false reports of “voter suppression, cyberattacks targeting election infrastructure, voter or ballot fraud, and other problems intended to convince the public of the elections’ illegitimacy,” the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a public advisory. Crooks or spies could set up websites or social media accounts to spread the false information, the agencies added. “The public should also be aware that if foreign actors or cyber criminals were able to successfully change an election-related website, the underlying data and internal systems would remain uncompromised,” the FBI and CISA statement said. The agencies urged voters to “rely on state and local government election officials” for official election results. With […]

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‘DisrupTor’ dark-web crackdown leads to 179 arrests by international law enforcement

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U.S. and European law enforcement agencies on Tuesday announced the arrest of 179 alleged drug traffickers and the seizure of millions in cash and virtual currencies in one of the largest takedowns of dark-web commerce to date. The crackdown seized more than 1,000 pounds in drugs and targeted an illicit supply chain of opioids, a highly addictive class of drug that has ravaged American lives in recent years. More than two-thirds of the arrests occurred in the U.S., officials said. The alleged drug dealers are accused of advertising on infamous dark-web sites such as AlphaBay and Dream. The takedown — dubbed Operation DisrupTor — involved investigators from Austria, Cyprus, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the U.S. “With the spike in opioid-related overdose deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, we recognize that today’s announcement is important and timely,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement. “The FBI will continue to […]

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German investigators treating ransomware attack as negligent homicide, reports say

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German prosecutors last week opened a homicide investigation into a deadly ransomware incident on a university hospital, according to multiple German media reports. If confirmed, it would be the first documented case of a death stemming, directly or indirectly, from a cyberattack, analysts say. Christoph Hebbecker, a cybercrime prosecutor in the German city of Cologne, said Friday that his office had opened an investigation into the ransomware attack as a “negligent homicide,” the Germany news agency DPA reported. The investigation centers around a ransomware infection that hobbled the IT systems of the University of Duesseldorf’s main hospital earlier this month. The disruption forced a critically ill patient to be redirected to a hospital 20 miles away. The patient later died, according to German media reports. Hebbecker’s spokesperson did not return a request for comment on Monday. The incident highlights the starkly different risks facing organizations with vulnerable software. For some, […]

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CISA orders agencies to quickly patch critical Netlogon bug

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For several days, security experts have urged organizations to fix a critical vulnerability in a Microsoft protocol that hackers could use to steal sensitive data. Now, U.S. government agencies don’t have a choice but to act. The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on late Friday evening ordered federal civilian agencies to apply a patch for the vulnerability by the end of the day Monday. The “emergency directive” — only the fourth ever issued by the agency — reflects the “unacceptable risk” the vulnerability poses to federal agencies because the affected software is used throughout the government, officials said. The bug is the latest in a bevy of critical flaws to emerge in popular software this year. In response, CISA has increasingly used its emergency-directive authority to try to keep foreign spies or criminals from burrowing into federal networks. In July, CISA gave agencies 24 hours to address another […]

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FBI hopes a more aggressive cyber strategy will disrupt foreign hackers

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Last week saw a flurry of U.S. indictments of alleged Chinese and Iranian hackers as part of a multi-agency crackdown on foreign intelligence services. The Department of Treasury issued sanctions, the Department of Homeland Security advised companies on how to fend off hackers and U.S. intelligence agencies likely kept a close eye on possible reactions from Beijing and Tehran. At the center of the coordinated crackdowns, though, were the FBI agents who tracked the computer infrastructure used by the suspects. The series of events was one of the first examples of the FBI’s new cybersecurity strategy in action. The goal of the effort, which officials revealed this month, is simple: impose harsher consequences on America’s digital adversaries by working more closely with intelligence agencies and data-rich private companies. For the FBI, that could mean trying to put a suspect in handcuffs, burning their identity through an indictment or opting to provide targeting […]

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