Category Archives: 2016 elections

Why did President Trump mention CrowdStrike to the Ukrainian president?

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During a controversial phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in July, Trump asked Zelensky for a “favor” to help locate a “server” linked with security company CrowdStrike, according to an unclassified transcript of the call released Wednesday. “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Trump said, according the document released by the White House. “I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the [U.S.] Attorney General [William Barr] call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom […]

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As NSA expands election security task force, Director Paul Nakasone talks lessons learned

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A key component of the Pentagon’s effort to defend the 2018 midterm elections from foreign interference was its collaboration with the Department of Justice to disrupt operations from overseas, Gen. Paul Nakasone, director of the National Security Agency, said Thursday. It’s the kind of interagency effort American officials are trying to achieve again before the 2020 presidential election. The NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, a unified combatant command at the Pentagon dedicated to running cyber-operations, worked with the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in 2018 as part of an effort to avoid the kind of Russian meddling that occurred in 2016, Nakasone said. The effort to protect the 2018 midterm elections, collectively known as Synthetic Theology, resulted in disrupting the internet access of Russia’s social media troll farm, the Internet Research Agency. The effort represented the first cyber-operations abroad to protect U.S. elections, and it’s helping inform the intelligence community’s approach to […]

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DEF CON Voting Village matures as industry keeps its distance

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The third annual Voting Village at the DEF CON hacking conference was a little different than years past. There were more machines to play with and more election personnel wandering around. And nobody publicly cursed out state officials or vendors. Attendees seemed buoyed by the fact that they were helping secure the 2020 election, which U.S. officials warn will again draw foreign interference attempts. “We have more people who are comfortable, immediately wanting to rip things apart and see how they work,” cryptologist Matt Blaze said with satisfaction. He was taking a rest in the corner of the village — a room in Las Vegas’ Planet Hollywood hotel littered with voting equipment ­— from the exertions of helping organize the gathering. “We don’t care if you break anything, as long as you’re doing it in an interesting way,” Blaze, a professor at Georgetown University, told CyberScoop. Across the room was Stephen Crane, […]

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NSA’s Russian cyberthreat task force is now permanent

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The task force the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command created last year to thwart Russian influence and cyberattacks on the U.S. is now permanent, spokespeople from both agencies confirmed to CyberScoop. The “Russia Small Group” — whose existence NSA Director Paul Nakasone announced in July of last year, absent guidance from the White House on how to handle Russian cyberthreats — settles in as the White House, Congress and the Pentagon have taken steps to clarify how and when the military should conduct offensive operations in cyberspace. The NSA would not comment on the number of people on the task force, where it is based, or when the operation became permanent. One intelligence official told CyberScoop the group’s new permanent designation, under routine operations, likely marks a surge of incoming resources, just as in any military surge. “We intend to build on this foundation as we prepare with our interagency partners for a broader challenge in the upcoming […]

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House Republican campaign arm hacked during 2018 election

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The National Republican Congressional Committee – the House GOP’s campaign organization – suffered a cyber intrusion during the 2018 election, a committee spokesman said Tuesday. “The NRCC can confirm that it was the victim of a cyber intrusion by an unknown entity,” NRCC spokesman Ian Prior said in a statement. “The cybersecurity of the committee’s data is paramount, and upon learning of the intrusion, the NRCC immediately launched an internal investigation and notified the FBI, which is now investigating the matter,” said Prior, a vice president at Mercury Public Affairs, a firm helping the NRCC respond to the breach. The NRCC had no further details beyond the statement. The breach exposed thousands of NRCC emails and appears to be the work of a sophisticated actor, a source familiar with the matter told CyberScoop. Politico was first to report on the NRCC breach, citing three senior party officials. Those officials would […]

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Research shows gap in House, Senate candidates’ website security

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Nearly 30 percent of House of Representatives candidates have significant security issues in their websites compared to less than 5 percent of Senate candidates, according to new research. The disparity underscores the challenge that smaller, resource-strapped campaigns have in making themselves less vulnerable to hacking. About 3 in 10 House candidate websites scanned by election-security expert Joshua Franklin and his research team were not using important security protocols for routing data or had a major certificate issue. The scans, most of which took place in June, covered the websites of more than 500 House candidates and nearly 100 Senate candidates. “The House has significantly more candidates running and that provides more opportunities for security errors,” Franklin told CyberScoop. He presented his findings at the DEF CON conference in Las Vegas. The major political parties’ Senate candidates also tend to be more experienced on the campaign trail and have bigger staffs for those statewide races. […]

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Zuckerberg: Facebook warned campaigns in 2016 about Russian hackers

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Facebook warned political campaigns involved in the 2016 presidential election that they were targets of Russian hackers, CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed while testifying before the Senate Tuesday. Previously, it was reported that Facebook had notified the FBI of Russia’s cyber operations, but not the political campaigns themselves.  “One of my greatest regrets in running the company is that we were slow in identifying the Russian information operations in 2016. We expected them to do a number of more traditional cyber attacks, which we did identify and notify the campaigns that they were trying to hack into them,” Zuckerberg told lawmakers. Zuckerberg revealed the new information while responding to question from Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., about how Facebook intends to prevent foreign governments from interfering in future US elections, a phenomenon the tech CEO had previously dismissed as “crazy.” A former member of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign said they were […]

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Here’s how much money states will receive for election security upgrades

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The Trump administration has told states exactly how much of a $380 million fund they will get to make their voting systems more cyber-secure ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The funding, made available through a $1.3 trillion omnibus package passed last week, is one of Congress’s first major steps to prevent a repeat of Russian hackers’ meddling in U.S. elections. The money can be used to upgrade state computer systems and offer cybersecurity training to election officials, among other things. California, Florida, New York and Texas together will get a quarter of the cash, with California leading the pack with about $35 million. A full breakdown of the funding can be found here. The money is a “breakthrough for election security and the health of our country’s democracy,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law. Lawmakers hailed their slice of the pie. “This federal […]

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Information sharing on election security is getting better, officials say

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Federal, state and local officials who oversee election infrastructure and security are optimistic about their ability to share information that’s needed to protect elections from malicious actors. At a Thursday panel hosted by the Center for Internet Security, individuals representing the Department of Homeland Security, state secretaries of state, and state election directors discussed the progress they’ve made on election security coordination since 2016. “The Department of Homeland security and the U.S. government are so involved in election security because starting in 2016, we really did assess that the threat of something happening to our elections was relatively high,” said Bob Kolasky, DHS’s acting undersecretary of the National Protection and Programs Directorate. “That does not mean that the risk to our elections systems has to be high.” When the U.S. intelligence community concluded in January 2017 that Russia meddled in the 2016 election, the DHS designated election systems as part of the country’s critical infrastructure. Kolasky acknowledged that […]

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