Category Archives: 2016 elections

US arrests Twitter troll accused of spreading election disinformation in 2016

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U.S. law enforcement officials say they’ve arrested an infamous far-right troll for allegedly using social media to spread disinformation in support of Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Douglass Mackey, a 31-year-old Florida man, is accused of using Twitter and other platforms to disenfranchise voters by encouraging them to vote via text or social media, which are invalid voting methods. Law enforcement officials arrested Mackey, who was better known as Ricky Vaughn on social media, on Wednesday, the Justice Department said in a statement. The arrest shows how investigations into electoral interference can take years, and is a reminder of the din of domestic disinformation that still challenges U.S. democracy. While the Russian effort to sow disinformation among U.S. voters in 2016 gained widespread attention, U.S.-based propagandists were also active. Mackey and other unnamed associates allegedly flooded social media for two months prior to Election Day in 2016, urging people to […]

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Wisconsin Republicans say last minute hack cost party $2 million meant to reelect Trump

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Less than a week before Election Day in a vital swing state, Wisconsin Republicans said on Thursday that hackers made off with $2.3 million devoted to reelecting President Donald Trump. The Republican Party of Wisconsin said it first detected the attack on Oct. 22, then notified the FBI the following day about doctored invoices in the names of its vendors. “Cybercriminals, using a sophisticated phishing attack, stole funds intended for the re-election of President Trump, altered invoices and committed wire fraud,” the party’s chairman, Andrew Hitt, said in a statement. “These criminals exhibited a level of familiarity with state party operations at the end of the campaign to commit this crime.” It’s common for hacking victims to claim they were the victims of “sophisticated” attacks, whether the attacks were rudimentary or not. Hitt and a party spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions seeking further details, including any evidence the […]

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How US security officials are watching for threats ahead of Election Day

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FBI Director Christopher Wray once called the 2018 midterm elections a “dress rehearsal for the big show” of protecting the 2020 presidential election from foreign interference. The big show is finally here, and American officials say they are pulling out all the stops to keep it secure. U.S. intelligence, law enforcement and national security agencies have for weeks been in an “enhanced operational posture” to share any election-related threats with state and local officials, said Chris Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The week before Election Day, which is Nov. 3, those security efforts will kick into overdrive. Officials from the Department of Defense, FBI, the Election Assistance Commission, political campaigns and the private sector are scheduled to gather at CISA’s operations center outside of Washington, D.C. The U.S. Postal Service, which is playing an expanded role in this year’s election with the increase in […]

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Microsoft looks to expose espionage groups taking aim at NGOs, US politics

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Foreign espionage groups, including those bent on undermining the U.S. political process, have targeted non-government organizations and think tanks more than any other sector in a bid to gather intelligence, according to new data from Microsoft. Of the thousands of notifications Microsoft made to customers about state-linked hacking activity from mid-2019 to mid-2020, NGOs accounted for 32% of those alerts, the company said in a report released Tuesday. And over 90% of those notifications have been outside of critical infrastructure sectors. The focus on targets outside Washington suggests hacking groups could be in search of softer targets during an election season when Democratic and Republican campaigns have enlisted more people and technology to protect their networks. Those changes came after suspected Russian military hackers breached the Democratic National Committee in 2016 and leaked emails aimed at damaging Hillary Clinton’s campaign. “At the national level and the leading campaigns, there’s a much higher degree of vigilance,” Microsoft’s Tom Burt told CyberScoop, comparing the state of […]

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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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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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As Trump rails against mail-in voting, DHS warns Russia is doing the same

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The Russian government will continue to use its media mouthpieces to attack mail-in voting and sow divisions among voters just weeks before the U.S. election, the Department of Homeland Security warned state and local election officials on Thursday. “We assess that Russia is likely to continue amplifying criticism of vote-by-mail and shifting voting processes amidst the COVID-19 pandemic to undermine public trust in the electoral process,” reads a DHS bulletin, which CyberScoop reviewed. “Since at least March 2020, Russian malign influence actors have been amplifying allegations of election integrity issues in new voting processes and vote-by-mail programs,” the memo says. Moscow’s reported denigration of the vote-by-mail process mirrors the criticisms leveled by President Donald Trump, who for weeks has baselessly claimed that mail-in voting can lead to widespread fraud. In reality, mail-in ballot fraud is exceptionally rare. On Wednesday, Trump suggested that voters should try voting twice in North Carolina, […]

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Final Senate Intel report details remarkable contact between Trump campaign, Russian spies

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President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager was closely tied to a person the United States considers a Russian intelligence officer, and may have been involved in the Russian hack-and-leak operation targeting Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, the Senate Intelligence Committee said in a bipartisan report released Tuesday. Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, hired Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian national and Ukrainian political operative, years ago to manage his consulting office in Ukraine, and had been working with Manafort since the mid-2000s, according to the Department of Justice. But while Special Counsel Robert Mueller previously said Kilimnik had “ties” to Russian intelligence, the bipartisan report identifies him as a Russian intelligence officer, and alleges that he has a possible connection to the Russian military’s hacking-and-dump scheme targeting Clinton and the Democratic National Committee in 2016. “Kilimnik is a Russian intelligence officer,” states the committee’s fifth report, the final installment of the committee’s investigation into Russian election interference in 2016. “Kilimnik may have been […]

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How a new federal policy for telling election officials about cyber-intrusions got put to use

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In early 2020, federal officials changed how they communicated with states about cyber-intrusions affecting election infrastructure. The Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency and the FBI would now inform senior state officials, and not just IT personnel, of election-related hacking incidents in a given state. Some state officials, who had criticized the federal government for being too slow and not specific enough in sharing data on Russian hacking in 2016, welcomed the new policy as another guardrail against foreign interference in 2020. And in March, at the height of the primary season, the policy was put into action. An unidentified hacker spoofed the email account of a voting-equipment vendor and sent a phishing email to a local election official in Missouri, according to multiple people familiar with the incident who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The official took the bait — a document purporting to be an “election funding report” but which really redirected the official to […]

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DNC issues another warning on TikTok, citing data security risks

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The Democratic National Committee on Friday reiterated a warning to Democratic campaigns, state parties and committees about the security risks of using the video-sharing app TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance. “Because of the amount of data it tracks, we continue to advise campaign staff to refrain from using TikTok on personal devices,” a DNC official told CyberScoop. “[I]f campaigns are using TikTok for campaign work, we recommend they use a separate phone and account.” The fresh warning, which DNC officials have been making for months, is the latest move by the political party to protect its data from compromise following the Russian hack of the DNC in 2016. It comes as TikTok faces greater scrutiny for its security practices from both U.S. government agencies and corporations. CNN was first to report on the DNC guidance. The video-sharing app is wildly popular. TikTok has been downloaded more than 2 billion […]

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