Category Archives: 2020 elections

Election security drill pits a red team of university students against DHS, FBI and police

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A year from the 2020 election, sophisticated exercises to help secure the vote are kicking into high gear. On Tuesday, executives from the Boston-based firm Cybereason will conduct an all-day tabletop exercise testing the resolve of officials from the Department of Homeland Security, FBI, and the police department of Arlington County, Virginia, among other organizations. The fictional scenario will involve attackers from an unnamed foreign government laying siege to a key city in a U.S. swing state. Hacking, physical attacks and disinformation via social media will be on the table as the attackers seek to flip the vote to their preferred candidate — or sow enough doubt among voters to undermine the result. One of the objectives of the red team — a group of George Washington University students and others — is voter suppression. That is exactly what Russian operatives aimed to achieve in 2016 and what, according to U.S. officials, […]

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Pentagon again deploying cyber personnel abroad to gather intel for 2020 elections

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The Pentagon once again is sending cyber personnel overseas to gather intelligence to help protect the 2020 presidential elections against foreign interference, the U.S. Embassy in Montenegro announced this week. U.S. European Command and U.S. Cyber Command are deploying an undisclosed number of staffers to Montenegro in order to gain insights into cyber threats from adversaries before both the U.S. and Montenegrin elections next year. It’s the second time in as many years the Department of Defense is running going through the effort as part of a partnership that’s uniquely poised to provide insights on possible Russian election interference. Montenegro and the U.S. both have been targeted by the Russian government-linked hacking outfit APT28, or Fancy Bear. If Cyber Command uncovers similar activity again in Montenegro, those insights could inform decisions on how to safeguard the U.S. “Montenegro is among the first in Europe to face unconventional attacks on its democracy and freedom […]

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Voting Village brings equipment to lawmakers to boost urgency on election security

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A year from the 2020 election and with a new round of election security funding stalled in Congress, the DEF CON Voting Village organizers have again taken to Capitol Hill to raise awareness about software vulnerabilities in voting equipment. This time, they brought the equipment with them to drive home their point. “If we’re going to meaningfully introduce funding or introduce new technologies for 2020, time is rapidly running out to be able to do that,” Matt Blaze, a professor at Georgetown University and co-organizer of the Voting Village, told CyberScoop. “We need to act pretty fast.” A handful of House Democrats and their staffers sauntered up to equipment on display, including a ballot-marking device and an electronic voting machine, to ask the researchers about the software bugs they found. “This is really helpful in understanding that these aren’t just abstract problems, that these are real things,” Blaze, an expert […]

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New Facebook security program will warn presidential candidates of hacking attempts

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Facebook on Monday announced a new security program for the Facebook and Instagram accounts of presidential campaigns and election officials in a bid to keep them from getting hacked. The voluntary program requires Facebook page administrators to enable two-factor authentication and, in turn, Facebook will monitor login attempts from unusual locations or devices. Once an anomalous login attempt is detected, Facebook’s security personnel can warn the whole organization. Administrators of Facebook pages will also go have to go through a separate step confirming they are authorized to publish information on behalf of an organization. The new program is another effort by Facebook to show the public that it has made security strides since Russian-backed actors used the social media platform as part of a sprawling operation to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. “I’m confident that we’re a lot more prepared [than in 2016],” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told reporters Monday. […]

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Lawmakers offer Illinois election work as blueprint to secure 2020

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U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday heard from Illinois officials who were on the front lines of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election in a hearing that held the state up as a model for election security. Since Russian hackers breached Illinois’ voter registration database in 2016, Illinois officials have set up an internal computer network to better protect voter data, established a “Cyber Navigator” program that embeds IT specialists in local election offices, and used the Illinois National Guard to protect the 2018 midterm vote. “It’s my hope that programs such as this can serve as models for other states,” said Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Illinois, vice chairwoman of the House Homeland Security Committee, which held the hearing. She was referring to the Cyber Navigator program, to which Illinois has dedicated roughly $6.9 million, the great majority of it federal grant money. To build on progress in Illinois and elsewhere, election security experts have called for larger […]

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Microsoft: U.S. presidential campaign, government officials targeted by recent hacking effort

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Microsoft said Friday that an Iranian government-linked hacking group had targeted email accounts associated with an unnamed U.S. presidential campaign along with current and former U.S. government officials. The Iranian hackers’ other targets included “journalists covering global politics and prominent Iranians living outside Iran,” said Tom Burt, a corporate vice president at Microsoft. Over 30 days between August and September, hackers tried to breach 241 email accounts belonging to certain Microsoft customers, according to Burt. With that came over 2,7000 attempts by the hackers to identify those specific email accounts. Four accounts were compromised as a result of the attempts. None of the breached accounts were associated with the U.S. presidential campaign, or current or former U.S. government officials, according to Microsoft. The company is working with the affected customers to secure their accounts, Burt said. The Democratic National Committee on Tuesday sent an advisory to Democratic presidential campaigns flagging the Microsoft announcement. The Iranian hackers have been “attacking […]

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FBI, DHS advise states on potential Russian voter suppression tactics in 2020

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The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have issued an advisory to state election officials that the Russian government could use voter suppression tactics in an attempt to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election, according to U.S and state officials familiar with the memo. The advisory sent this week to states’ secretaries of state and security advisers cautions that Moscow could try to keep Americans away from the polls next year by, for example, trying to breach voter registration databases or fanning political tensions online, said the officials familiar with memo, which is titled, “Russia May Try to Discourage Voter Turnout and Suppressing Votes in 2020 US Election.” The document is marked “For Official Use Only.” The officials described the advisory as a proactive effort to stay on top of the threat. “We want to make sure we’re pushing out as much information as possible to the front lines,” a senior Trump administration […]

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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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10,000 Microsoft customers targeted by nation-state attacks in the last year

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Microsoft has notified 10,000 customers in the past year that they have been the brunt of nation-state cyberattacks — some of which were successful — from Iran, North Korea, and Russia, Microsoft announced Wednesday. “This data demonstrates the significant extent to which nation-states continue to rely on cyberattacks as a tool to gain intelligence, influence geopolitics or achieve other objectives,” Tom Burt, corporate vice president of customer security & trust at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post on the matter. Microsoft has linked the attacks with a group linked with Iran broadly known as APT 33, with a group from North Korea known as APT 38, as well as two groups linked with Russia, APT 28 and APT 29, which Microsoft dubs Strontium and Yttrium respectively. APT 28 was behind the intrusions at the Democratic National Committee. Some of the attacks observed appear to be related to U.S. politics and […]

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Trump’s Pentagon pick ‘confident’ in 2020 election security

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Defense secretary nominee Mark Esper told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that although there is still work to be done, he is confident in the security of the 2020 presidential elections. “We are more and more confident that the 2020 elections will be unfettered,” Esper said. “But we always will have a lot of work to do because people will always want to influence our elections.” The 2020 elections remain a target of state and non-state cyber actors, a senior intelligence official told reporters last month in a briefing. Esper, who has been serving as secretary of the U.S. Army since 2017, highlighted U.S. Cyber Command’s capabilities while discussing election security. Efforts made in the buildup to the 2018 midterm elections left the U.S. with an improved posture than years prior, he said. Some of the command’s efforts to defend the midterm elections in 2018 included deploying soldiers to […]

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