Category Archives: 2016 elections

Biden campaign hires ex-White House official Chris DeRusha as CISO

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Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, has turned to a former White House cybersecurity official to protect the campaign’s networks from hackers. Biden’s campaign said Friday it had hired Chris DeRusha, who served as a White House cybersecurity adviser when Biden was vice president, as the campaign’s chief information security officer. DeRusha, who has also held cybersecurity positions with the State of Michigan, the Department of Homeland Security and Ford Motor Co., will be charged with safeguarding the campaign’s digital assets in an election that U.S. officials expect to draw continued foreign interference. The Biden campaign has also hired software engineer Jacky Chang as its chief technology officer. Chang worked as a technologist for the Democratic National Committee and for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Biden for President takes cybersecurity seriously and is proud to have hired high quality personnel with a diverse breadth of experience, knowledge and […]

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Securing voter registration databases takes on added importance in pandemic, DHS official says

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The expansion of voting by mail during the coronavirus pandemic makes it all the more important that election officials secure voter registration databases from hacking, according to a senior Department of Homeland Security official. The greater amount of absentee voting and mail-in ballots “shifts the risk towards voter registration data security,” Matt Masterson, senior adviser at DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said Wednesday during a virtual conference. People voting by mail generally won’t have access to the same provisional-balloting process that those voting in person can use if they’ve been left off of voter rolls due to an administrative error. That makes the integrity of voter registration data all the more important in the era of COVID-19, Masterson said. The novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 120,000 people in the U.S., has forced many states to postpone presidential primaries and ramp up voting-by-mail options. Forty-six states currently offer all of their voters some form […]

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Feds, states unveil pilot program meant to secure voter databases and other election systems

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Election officials and nonprofit security advocates on Wednesday announced a pilot program for testing and verifying voter registration databases, election night reporting and other systems meant to support voting. The pilot program will focus on making the software that’s used in election systems more secure as it is developed, and before it is deployed. The aim is to close a gap in security testing for the broad set of election infrastructure outside of voting machines, which are already the subject of voluntary federal security guidelines. “There is no standard process for verifying that non-voting election technology is secure, reliable, and usable,” said the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which is spearheading the pilot program. “Existing election technology verification processes are costly, slow, and disincentivize updating products at the same pace as technology changes and security threats.” Under the pilot program, election systems vendors will submit their products to CIS for testing. […]

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DHS memo: ‘Significant’ security risks presented by online voting

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The Department of Homeland Security has told election officials and voting vendors that internet-connected voting is risky to the point that ballots returned online “could be manipulated at scale” by a malicious attacker. The advisory that DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency sent states on Friday is perhaps the federal government’s sternest warning yet against online voting. It comes as officials weigh their options for conducting elections during a pandemic and as digital voting vendors see an opportunity to hawk their products. While the risk of election officials delivering ballots to voters via the internet can be managed, the return of those ballots by voters “faces significant security risks to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of voted ballots,” CISA said in the guidance, which CyberScoop reviewed. “These risks can ultimately affect the tabulation and results and, can occur at scale.” The guidance, which is marked “For Official Use Only” and […]

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Reality Winner seeks clemency for leaking NSA report on Russian hacking attempts

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Former National Security Agency contractor Reality Winner is asking President Donald Trump to grant her clemency after she was sent to prison for leaking government secrets about Russian hacking. Winner was sentenced in 2018 after she allegedly mailed classified information from the NSA to The Intercept that explained how Russian hackers sent spearphishing emails to a voting software supplier and local election officials prior to the 2016 elections. Winner pleaded guilty at the time, and was sentenced to more than five years, the longest-ever term imposed by a federal court in a case of leaked government information to the media. Winner and her lawyer, who has submitted a formal petition for commutation at the Department of Justice, are asking Trump to “do the right thing” and “forgive our truth tellers” in the midst of foreign attacks against the U.S. political processes. “Our country was attacked by a hostile foreign power,” Winner’s attorney, Alison Grinter, […]

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Obama administration ‘not well-postured’ to counter Russian election interference, Senate committee finds

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The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded that the Obama administration’s response to Russian election interference during the 2016 presidential election campaign was largely hamstrung by partisan concerns and a difficulty understanding the true scope of Russian capabilities and intentions, according to a new bipartisan report issued Thursday. The report broadly addresses information-sharing issues, why a delay in definitive attribution to Russia took place and fears about undermining Americans’ trust in election processes. It’s the latest installment of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s findings from its probe into Russia’s efforts, and comes after two prior reports on election security and Russia’s information operations. Siloed understanding of cyber issues The administration was caught off-guard by the concept of Russian cyber-operations pivoting from espionage to more disruptive measures, the report found. “Witnesses interviewed by the committee consistently said that Russian cyber activity was a well-known issue within the administration, however hardly any administration officials had […]

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As Iowa caucuses loom, states drill with feds to protect 2020 elections

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With the Iowa caucuses just days away, state election officials from around the country gathered this week in Washington, D.C., to drill for cyberattacks, study ransomware and learn how to work with ethical hackers. The level of collaboration was unthinkable four years ago, when Russia-backed hackers and trolls interfered to the electoral process. Then, it took many months for federal officials to notify states that their systems had been targeted, and states bristled at the Department of Homeland Security’s 2017 designation of election systems as critical infrastructure. Now, federal and state officials are mapping out how a foreign adversary might try to undermine the democratic process, and practicing how they would thwart those attacks. “We’re light years ahead today from where we were [in the aftermath of 2016]” Mac Warner, the secretary of state of West Virginia, said Thursday at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference. Warner said […]

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State election officials will get fresh intelligence briefing after Iran tensions

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In the wake of the U.S.-Iran standoff and just weeks before the first Democratic primary, the intelligence community’s lead official for election security will brief state officials on the top cyberthreats to the U.S. electoral process. Shelby Pierson, the intelligence community’s election threats executive, said that the briefing this Thursday will cover full gamut of digital threats to U.S. elections, including those emanating from Iran. Asked if Iran is more likely to interfere in the 2020 election after the U.S. military killed Tehran’s top general earlier this month, Pierson told reporters Tuesday that “it certainly is something that we’re prepared for.” “Our adversaries look to the political climate … it wouldn’t surprise me at all that this is part of the calculus,” she added. Pierson, who assumed her post last July, used a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to raise awareness about digital threats facing the […]

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Blunt phone call shows state officials are unhappy with rollout of election security framework

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Mac Warner needed to get something off his chest. The secretary of state of West Virginia had patiently listened to federal officials explain their updated process for notifying state officials and the public of foreign attempts to interfere in U.S. elections. As the Nov. 8 phone call with election officials across the country came to a close, Warner said he wouldn’t mince words the way one of his “silver-tongued” colleagues had done while offering feedback on the updated process. “The analogy that came to me is the realigning of the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Warner said, according to a call transcript obtained by CyberScoop. “I think this is a straightening up of the chairs: It feels good and so forth, but you’re not getting to the substance.” It was one of multiple blunt exchanges about the new threat-notification framework, which is meant to give U.S. officials a consistent process for alerting state personnel, the private sector, Congress, and […]

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DNC to Silicon Valley on disinformation: do better

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The Democratic National Committee is calling on companies including Facebook, Twitter, and Google to step up their efforts to protect against disinformation on their platforms in the buildup to the 2020 presidential elections. The DNC’s recommendations, which it issued Monday, range from platforms promoting authoritative news outlets to establishing policies to prevent the automated spread of disinformation. The DNC is also calling on the companies to take a harder line against state-backed media, and to share more details about disinformation campaigns online to try enhancing the research community’s ability to understand political disinformation. “While progress has been made since the 2016 elections, platforms still have much to do to reduce the spread of disinformation and combat malicious activity,” the DNC writes. The recommendations show the Democratic Party, just a little over two months before the Iowa Democratic caucuses, rallying behind the idea that tamping down disinformation can help ensure a political […]

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