Category Archives: 2016 presidential election

Rep. Speier: Congress needs a hack demo to understand election vulnerabilities

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Lawmakers still need a hands-on demonstration of voting equipment vulnerabilities to fully grasp the urgency of election security, according to Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif. “I think that if we can fashion some kind of an interactive experience for members to watch… then we’ve got their attention,” Speier, a member of the intelligence committee, said in an interview. “We need that moment and we need that equipment, and we need that hack. And so once we can do that and do it in a way that the average luddite can understand, then we’ll be golden.” DEF CON, the hacking conference where researchers pick apart voting machines, provides that kind of visual demonstration. But Speier appeared to be the only lawmaker in attendance last week as the organizers of the DEF CON Voting Village presented their findings on Capitol Hill. (Some congressional staff did attend.) Election security vaulted into the spotlight on […]

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Wyden: Tech company has told multiple senators of foreign hacking attempts

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A major tech company has informed “a number of senators and Senate staff members” that foreign government hackers have targeted their personal email accounts, according to Sen. Ron Wyden. In a Sept. 19 letter to Senate leadership, Wyden, D-Ore., did not name the company or identify the foreign hackers, but he did warn that the publicly reported activity of a Russian government-linked hacking group may be just “the tip of the iceberg” when it comes to advanced cyberthreats to lawmakers. The group, often referred to as Fancy Bear, breached the IT networks of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 as part of a coordinated hack-and-leak operation that the U.S. intelligence community attributed to Moscow. “The November election grows ever closer, Russia continues its attacks on our democracy, and the Senate simply does not have the luxury of further delays” in shoring up its cybersecurity, Wyden wrote to Senate Majority Leader Mitch […]

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Trump’s executive order designed to ‘counter the visuals of Helsinki’

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A top State Department official says President Donald Trump’s new executive order to combat foreign election-meddling is an inter-agency check on the optics of the Helsinki Summit in July, where Trump questioned whether the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. “The president can always decide ‘no,’” – meaning sanctions won’t be imposed — “but [the executive order] is designed to have these assessments come up from the bottom and be presented with the notion that there should in fact be a consequence to bad behavior,” Michele Markoff, the State Department’s deputy coordinator for cyber issues, said Wednesday at an Atlantic Council panel discussion in Washington, D.C. The executive order, signed by Trump Wednesday, allows for “automatic sanctions” to kick in when U.S. officials find evidence of foreign interference in the electoral process. That automaticity “was designed to counter the visuals of Helsinki,” Markoff said. “All policy is going […]

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Election exercise pairs states with intelligence community in unprecedented opportunity

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Forty-four states took part in an unprecedented election-security exercise last week that offered a crucial opportunity for electoral officials to interact with federal agencies with some of the most vaunted cyber capabilities in the government. This elaborate a security exercise simply didn’t happen in 2016: before the Russian government’s sweeping intervention in the U.S. election, it was hard to imagine the need for local and state officials to drill with the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command. But with 2016 fresh in their minds, those officials have warmed to the idea. “The biggest obstacle that we had in 2016 was communication, and so I think a lot of those barriers have been torn down and states are more willing to hear from the federal government,” Election Assistance Commission Commissioner Thomas Hicks told CyberScoop. “[O]ne of the most valuable parts” of the drill, Hicks added, was that it drove home for state […]

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Pence urges states to accept federal help in securing elections

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Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday delivered the most direct and high-profile appeal from the Trump administration to states to accept federal aid in securing election systems, citing a recent “malware attack” in Kansas as a need for state-federal cooperation. “Take advantage of the assistance offered by our administration,” Pence said at the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity summit in New York City. “Do everything in your power to strengthen and protect your election systems.” “It concerns us that many states still don’t have concrete plans to update their voting systems,” said Pence, the former governor of Indiana. “Fourteen states are struggling to replace outdated voting machines that lack paper trails before the next presidential election [in 2020].” To emphasize the need for federal election-security assistance, the vice president shed light on what he described as a “malware attack” within the last two weeks in Finney County, Kansas. Finney County […]

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NSA chief confirms he set up task force to counter Russian hackers

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The head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command confirmed over the weekend that he has set up a task force to counter Russian cyberthreats to the United States. Describing Russia as a “near-peer threat” in cyberspace that has “great capabilities,”Gen. Paul Nakasone said the task force is “in line with what the intelligence community has really been doing since post-2016/2017.” Speaking at a conference in Aspen, Colo., Nakasone didn’t elaborate on the activities or composition of the so-called “Russia Small Group,” but he did allude to the challenges of responding proportionally to foreign cyber operations that do not amount to acts of war. U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in a report in January 2017 that hackers linked with the Russian government meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by breaching multiple political organizations. “What we’ve seen our adversaries do over a period of years is the fact that they operate […]

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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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Lawmakers look to fortify federal cyber defenses ahead of 2018 midterms

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A bipartisan pair of House lawmakers have introduced legislation aimed at strengthening U.S. infrastructure ahead of midterm elections this fall. The bill from Reps. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., and Val Demings, D-Fla., is an effort to shore up U.S. cyber defenses by, among other measures, urging agencies to fully implement an executive order on cybersecurity that President Donald Trump issued last year. The president’s directive makes agency heads accountable for cyber risk – such as nation-state hacking – that can affect the entire government. Within 60 days of the legislation’s enactment, Trump would owe a report to Congress on what steps agencies had taken to “better detect, monitor, and mitigate cyberattacks.” Stefanik and Demings’s “Defend Against Russian Disinformation Act,” would also boost U.S. military cooperation with NATO. Cybersecurity analysts have held up Estonia, a neighbor of Russia and NATO member, as a model of cyber resiliency. The U.S. intelligence community concluded that […]

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‘Aggressive posture’ defines election security work, DHS official tells senators

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A senior Department of Homeland Security official on Tuesday defended its work to help secure voting systems before midterm elections, but a top Democratic lawmaker worried those efforts were insufficient. DHS has “adopted an aggressive posture” to help state officials secure their voting infrastructure and will do all it can ahead of Election Day, DHS’s Jeanette Manfra told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. At the same time, she said, the department has yet to detect Russian cyber-activity on state systems this election season. DHS will use the $26 million in additional election-security funding provided by the March omnibus to increase vulnerability assessments and other services it offers states, Manfra told CyberScoop after the hearing. That money is separate from the $380 million the bill allocated directly to individual states to do things like upgrade their computer systems and train officials in cybersecurity. But Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., the committee’s […]

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Indictments reveal how Russia’s 2016 election information warfare worked

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Russian operatives were able to obfuscate their activities in 2016 by stealing the identities of U.S. citizens, renting servers based in the U.S. and using a VPN all while posting targeted propaganda on social media to disrupt American politics, according to a new and lengthy criminal case against multiple Russian nationals. The Justice Department on Friday released an indictment against 13 Russian individuals and three Russian companies accused of violating federal U.S. criminal law to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The defendants are charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, wire fraud and identity theft. Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference released the detailed charges Friday, accusing a long list of Russians of supporting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and working against Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. A recent leak of Julian Assange’s personal messages showed WikiLeaks pushing for the same goal. “The defendants waged what they called ‘information warfare against the […]

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