Category Archives: 2018 elections

Tech companies offered free products to help secure the election. Now what?

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The unprecedented foreign hacking and misinformation campaigns that were reported around the 2016 U.S. election cast a cloak of doubt over the integrity of the country’s democratic process. The threat sent government officials on the federal, state and local level scrambling to ensure that the country’s voting machines, voter registration systems, pollbooks, results-reporting websites and other election technology is ready for the midterm elections. Over the past few months, about a dozen technology companies have announced programs offering state and local election offices or political organizations free services to help them fend off looming threats, including email protection, extra security for cloud applications, basic antivirus coverage, multi-factor authentication tools and several other types of products. As elections in the U.S. are run by the states, securing a federal election requires a massive coordinated effort. The federal government has been playing a greater role to this end since 2016, but can only do so much without […]

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The key to protecting the midterms is resilience for election systems, experts say

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With less than three weeks until the midterm elections, a lot of work has gone into preparing for the threat of election interference. But experts speaking at the CyberTalks conference on Thursday acknowledged that disaster could still strike, and that the officials who run U.S. elections have to be armed with proper resources and resilient systems. “We’re not seeing activity right now relating to direct election hacking. We’re not seeing anything right now along the lines of 2016, and that frankly makes me a little nervous,” said Homeland Security Undersecretary Chris Krebs. “So we’re working aggressively with our partners, the state and local [officials] to work through what an adversary could do with a two-and-a-half-week lead-up to the midterm elections.” U.S. intelligence officials have stressed over the past two years that Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 election. Krebs said the hope is now to avoid a “failure of […]

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Report: hackers are crowdfunding to buy voter data on the dark web

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Voter records from 19 states are for sale on underground hacker forums, according to research from Anomali and Intel 471 published Monday. The discovery highlights hackers’ ongoing interest in exploiting voter data and certainly marks unauthorized use of the data, but likely can’t be called a breach, depending on how the data was obtained. While the records are being illicitly sold, they’re not necessarily illicitly obtained. In many states, basic voter information, like name, address and party affiliation are public records. However, there are varying restrictions around who is allowed to obtain them, sometimes being limited to journalists, researchers or political campaigns. The researchers estimate the vendors are offering more than 35 million records from the following states: Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. The report says the price for a state […]

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The Attack on Fair Elections Is a Great Marketing Opportunity For Tech Companies

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With Donald Trump downplaying and denying Russian attempts to interfere with American elections, companies like Microsoft, Google, and Cloudflare have filled the void as defenders of democracy. Continue reading The Attack on Fair Elections Is a Great Marketing Opportunity For Tech Companies→

Trump administration touts “extensive, historic” actions to secure elections

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Numerous Trump administration officials spent Thursday expounding upon the efforts the government is taking to curb Russian-linked actors’ efforts to interfere with the 2018 midterm elections. National security adviser John Bolton, for example, issued a vigorous defense of President Donald Trump’s “extensive, historic” efforts to strengthen the security of U.S. elections while offering lawmakers classified briefings on these efforts. In a rebuttal to congressional Democrats, who have criticized Trump’s election-security efforts as insufficient, Bolton asserted that National Security Council meetings on the subject in July and May were evidence of “a level of dedication and action with respect to this threat that far exceeds that of previous administrations.” In a letter to five Democratic senators, Bolton said the Trump administration is taking “unprecedented action to punish Russia for its efforts to disrupt the political and electoral processes core to American democracy and the American way of life.” The Senate Democrats had written Bolton asking the White […]

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Russian hackers targeted 2018 reelection campaign of vulnerable Democrat

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The same outfit of Russian hackers that launched cyberattacks against U.S. targets in the 2016 presidential election appears to have targeted Sen. Claire McCaskill, a critic of Moscow and red-state Democrat who faces a tough reelection bid. The news, first reported by the Daily Beast, makes the Missouri senator the first to be named in 2018 as a target of Russian hackers. There are at least two others. Last week, Microsoft executive Tom Burt said that earlier this year, hackers associated with the GRU, the Russian intelligence agency behind cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns during the 2016 presidential election, used spearphishing and fake Microsoft domains to target three candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. Burt said that the unnamed candidates “might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint as well as from an election standpoint.” McCaskill fits the bill on both counts. She serves as the ranking Democrat on the Homeland Security and Government […]

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Microsoft reveals first known Russian hacking attempt aimed at 2018 midterms

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The same Russian hacking group that breached the Democratic National Committee (DNC) also tried to penetrate the campaigns of several candidates running for the midterm elections, a Microsoft executive revealed for the first time Thursday. The disclosure marks the first known case of a foreign government explicitly targeting the 2018 election. Speaking on an election security panel at the Aspen Security Forum, Tom Burt, vice president for customer security and trust at Microsoft, said there had been three separate attempts to hack 2018 midterm campaigns earlier this year. Microsoft’s security team, which counts both Republican and Democratic campaigns among its clients, detected a series of spear phishing emails sent to midterm candidates. The emails paralleled similar activity from 2016 previously attributed to Russian hacking group “APT28,” also known as “Fancy Bear.” Burt declined to name the campaigns but said: “I can tell you that they were all people who, because […]

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Election security legislation gains attention on Capitol Hill

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Senators are making a renewed push to secure voting infrastructure ahead of the midterm elections through measures that would boost states’ cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies and require the use of paper ballots. As the Senate considers an annual defense policy bill, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., is urging support for a bipartisan amendment that would tighten cyberthreat information sharing between states and the intelligence community. “With the new kind of [information] warfare we’re seeing,” Klobuchar said Tuesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, failing to update U.S. law would be “a very big lost opportunity.” The Secure Elections Act sponsored by Klobuchar and Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., would task the Department of Homeland Security – which is already a hub for passing intelligence from federal to state officials – with quickly sharing election-related threats with all state election agencies. The bill also aims to speed up the security-clearance process for state […]

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Lawmaker hopes to draw redline discouraging election cyberattacks

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A prominent lawmaker wants to draw a line in the sand to discourage hackers from targeting U.S. election systems. On Tuesday, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., suggested that the United States formally declare it will respond in cyberspace to any foreign interference in American elections. Warner, who serves as vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, proposed the idea in an amendment to the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), an annual defense policy bill. Warner’s amendment suggests that the United States alter its cyber doctrine to respond accordingly when and if a foreign adversary launches a cyberattack to undermine U.S. elections. The proposed NDAA for fiscal year 2019 is already a significant departure from former versions. For the first time, it offers clear marching orders to the newly elevated U.S. Cyber Command. The bill also directs U.S. cyber forces to go on the attack in response to cyber […]

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Democrats and Republicans split over using hacked material in campaigns

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Another Democrat-Republican feud is showing that when it comes to politically charged hacking, politics may not stop at the water’s edge. The divide is focused on whether political parties should be allowed to use insider information that’s provided by hackers; similar to what occurred at the state level in 2016. Last week, a Democratic lawmaker on the House Intelligence Committee introduced a bill that would punish federal candidates if they fail to notify the FBI whenever a suspected hacking group offers them political dirt. On Thursday, Rep. Eric Swalwell introduced the “Duty to Report Act.” The proposed law would make it a crime for campaign staffers to not tip the government off to certain suspected hacking activities. Swalwell unveiled the bill on the same week as the two-year anniversary of the now infamous Trump Tower meeting, where Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer who ambiguously offered damaging political […]

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