Collaborate Disseminate
Researchers shared the data to provide a more complete context about the data and questions surrounding it, they said.
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The Michigan State Police launched a criminal investigation this week after a piece of election equipment went missing. The inquiry comes after a local official—who has publicly questioned the validity and security of the 2020 election—had refused to allow a company vendor to run maintenance on the machine. Adams Township Clerk Stephanie Scott had been stripped of her election administration authority on Monday for failing to confirm that she would follow state law in certifying that public accuracy testing had been completed. A spokesperson for the Michigan State Police told CyberScoop Friday that the agency executed a search warrant in the rural community as part of an investigation requested by the Secretary of State, but declined to offer any additional information. Neither Scott nor a spokesperson for Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson responded to requests for comment. This is the second example in recent months of election officials taking extreme […]
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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s former lead election security official is recommending comprehensive changes to protect the ballot in future elections, from physical safety upgrades for election workers and federal agency revamps to mandated disclosure of cyber incidents. A report published Thursday from former CISA election adviser Matt Masterson, who now works for Stanford’s Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, is a response to the complications that surrounded the 2020 elections. Namely, 2020 was marred by misinformation that undermined public faith in elections, inconsistent funding to mitigate IT vulnerabilities and threats against election officials, the report concludes. The battle over the 2020 presidential race rages on, with the GOP pushing partisan election reviews in several states despite numerous recounts that concluded with Joe Biden as the victor. “Our democracy is in trouble,” Masterson told CyberScoop. “We are in a downward spiral of distrust of the process. If we don’t make […]
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It looks like the Russian government-linked hacking group Cozy Bear is back in the election trickery business. The security firm Volexity publicized a spearphishing campaign on Thursday that it identified only days ago, a scheme that uses an election fraud document as a lure. The emails purport to be from the the United States Agency for International Development, with targets including government agencies, research institutions and nongovernmental organizations in the U.S. and Europe. Volexity said it had concluded, with moderate confidence, that Cozy Bear — the group also known as APT29 or the Dukes — was behind the emails. If true, it would be a return to an old favorite subject for Cozy Bear, which the U.S. government and others implicated in the 2016 hacks of the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, among other election interference efforts. More recently, Cozy Bear has garnered attention from the Biden […]
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The governments of Russia and Iran sought to influence the U.S. presidential elections in 2020 and exacerbate societal tensions throughout the nation last year, the U.S. intelligence community said in a declassified assessment released Tuesday. The long awaited report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing how foreign governments sought to influence or interfere in U.S. elections declared that Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized the influence operations that were aimed at denigrating Joe Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party while supporting then-President Donald Trump. The assessment states that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “probably” authorized Iran’s campaign, which was aimed at undermining Trump’s reelection. Both Russia and Iran intended to undermine public confidence in the electoral process as well, the report states. China did not run influence operations aimed at the U.S. elections, but Chinese authorities had considered doing so, the U.S. intelligence community found. The assessment, which […]
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Russian, Chinese and Iranian government-linked operatives were active in advance of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, but their intrusions into U.S. organizations did not compromise the integrity of the vote, U.S. officials said Tuesday. The report released Tuesday by the departments of Homeland Security and Justice points to growing interest by an array of foreign actors to influence U.S. voters, but “found no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor manipulated election results or otherwise compromised the integrity” of the 2020 vote. “The playbook of Russia in 2016 is out there,” Geoffrey Hale, head of CISA’s Election Security Initiative, said in an interview. “Even in a very secure election, there are incidents, and in this cycle, you saw multiple nation-states involved.” In a separate finding made public Tuesday, the U.S. intelligence community said Russia and Iran had conducted multi-faceted operations to try to influence the vote, and that China had “considered, […]
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When Christopher Krebs was director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), his job was to make sure he understood the risk management landscape so the agency could fulfill its role as th… Continue reading How Threat Modeling Enabled Election Security
Voting equipment maker Dominion Voting Systems on Monday sued former President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for $1.3 billion for spreading election-related conspiracy theories that the vendor says amount to defamation. It’s the latest in a series of high-value lawsuits that Dominion has leveled at Trump allies who have promoted false conspiracy theories about the voting machine vendor flipping votes for Joe Biden during the 2020 election. Dominion employees have received a barrage of death threats, and the company says it has “suffered unprecedented and irreparable harm,” because of conspiracy theories stoked by Giuliani, the lawyer Sidney Powell and other pro-Trump public figures. “Dominion brings this action to set the record straight…and to stand up for itself, its employees, and the electoral process,” reads the suit filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District Columbia. It follows a $1.3 billion defamation suit that Dominion filed against […]
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As America reels from the deadly Capitol Hill insurrection, Russia, Iran and China are using their state media mouthpieces to exploit U.S. divisions and further their interests ahead of Joe Biden’s inauguration, according to a new U.S. intelligence analysis obtained by CyberScoop. The Jan. 14 intelligence memo produced by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security shows how U.S. adversaries wasted no time in amplifying scenes from the pro-Trump mob’s siege of the Capitol building. Russian state media has harped on the Jan. 6 riot’s “violent and chaotic nature,” while focusing on the second impeachment of President Donald Trump, according to the memo. One Russian “proxy” suggested that “Antifa,” a loose collection of left-wing activists, was responsible for the storming of the Capitol, the intelligence memo said. Some Republican lawmakers also have mentioned that baseless conspiracy theory. Iranian state media has zeroed in on calls for Trump’s removal from office […]
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Facebook’s lockdown of President Donald Trump’s account will now last at least two weeks and possibly longer, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday morning. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg said in a post announcing that a 24-hour ban instituted Wednesday evening would be extended “indefinitely.” The lockdown also applies to Trump’s Instagram account. Zuckerberg’s decision comes as social media platforms continue to reckon with Trump’s incitement of a mob that entered the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday with the intent of disrupting the count of Electoral College ballots that would certify Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election. Trump’s repetition Wednesday of baseless claims about election fraud capped weeks of buildup among supporters who planned to descend on Congress. Many of the conversations encouraging Americans to descend on the Capitol occurred on social […]
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