Category Archives: 2020 elections

US agencies conclude Iran is likely behind website aimed at stoking violence against election officials

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The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have concluded that Iran is very likely behind a website apparently aimed at inciting violence against election officials as well as the FBI director, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter. The website, titled Enemies of the People, posted photos and purported addresses of state election officials and employees of a voting equipment vendor, as well as information on FBI Director Christopher Wray and Chris Krebs, the former head of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. The website, which is now inactive, falsely blamed the officials for the electoral loss of President Donald Trump, and featured a bull’s eye target over the officials’ photos. The revelation shows the extent to which Iran has tried to sow discord in the U.S. before and after the presidential election, which Trump has repeatedly and baselessly claimed was tainted by fraud. Before Election […]

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Bill Barr: No, we won’t be seizing voting machines

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Attorney General William Barr declined to endorse a desperate effort by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to overturn Trump’s electoral defeat by seizing voting machines. Barr said at a press conference Monday that he had not seen evidence of widespread fraud that could change the result of the election, and that there was “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government.” He also rejected the idea of naming a special counsel to investigate voter fraud allegations. States have certified their results in the election, which saw Joe Biden win by more than 7 million in the popular vote. Election security officials have declared the election secure. Claims of widespread voting irregularities made by Trump’s lawyers have been roundly rejected in court. Giuliani nonetheless last week pushed Ken Cuccinelli, a senior Department of Homeland Security official, to confiscate voting machines, the New York Times and Wall Street […]

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Matt Masterson, CISA’s top election security official, to step down

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Matt Masterson, one of the U.S. government’s top election experts, is leaving his post as of next week for a role in academia where he will continue to study the disinformation campaigns that have plagued the country, he told CyberScoop on Thursday. Masterson has been a senior adviser at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency since 2018. He led a team that reassured the public that the 2020 election was secure, despite President Donald Trump’s baseless assertions to the contrary. Masterson will join the Stanford Internet Observatory, a team of academics and tech experts led by former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, which works on election security and social media challenges. Masterson said his last day at CISA will be Dec. 18. At Stanford, “We’re going to unpack what we’ve learned over the last few years [on election security],” Masterson said in an interview, including “what […]

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Former CISA director Chris Krebs sues Trump campaign, lawyer after death threats

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Chris Krebs, a former U.S. cybersecurity official whom President Donald Trump fired for saying the 2020 election was secure, has sued the Trump campaign, one of its lawyers and the conservative media outlet Newsmax for defamation after the lawyer made violent threats against Krebs. The lawyer, Joe diGenova, said last week in a video on Newsmax that Krebs should be “taken out at dawn and shot” and “drawn and quartered” for contradicting Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud and saying the election was secure. Krebs filed suit in a Maryland court on Tuesday, asking for monetary damages and for Newsmax to remove any recording of the threatening video from its website. The lawsuit cites numerous death threats Krebs has received via text and email since. The filing also accuses Trump and his legal team of carrying out a “pernicious conspiracy” to defame other Republicans who have refuted the president’s claims […]

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Cyber Command deployed personnel to Estonia to protect elections against Russian threat

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Personnel from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Cyber Command deployed to Estonia in recent months as part of a broader effort to protect U.S. elections against foreign hacking, American and Estonian officials announced Thursday. The mission allowed personnel from U.S. Cyber Command and Estonia’s Defense Forces Cyber Command to collaborate on hunting for malicious hacking efforts on critical networks from adversaries, officials said. Estonia in particular could help the U.S. glean intelligence about Russian cyber-operations, as it has borne the brunt of Russian hacking in the past. Montenegro, a perennial target of Russian hacking, has also worked with Cyber Command on similar missions, known as “Hunt Forward” missions, to protect the 2020 presidential elections against foreign hacking. As the thinking goes, Cyber Command can run these kinds of operations to help protect a foreign ally against intrusions conducted by shared adversaries, while also obtaining information that could help protect U.S. […]

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Former CISA deputy details ouster, condemns violent threat from Trump campaign

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The former deputy of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency on Tuesday faulted the Trump campaign for politicizing election security and condemned a violent threat from a campaign lawyer toward his former boss, Chris Krebs, in his first public comments since leaving the agency. “I have yet to see a partisan issue within securing America’s infrastructure that warrants politicizing what we do,” Matt Travis, former deputy CISA director, said during a virtual event hosted by the Aspen Institute. “And what we were hearing from the Trump campaign was in effect politicizing the security of a sub-sector of infrastructure, namely the election system.” President Donald Trump on Nov. 17 fired Krebs as CISA director after Krebs and his agency repeatedly debunked the president’s baseless claims of electoral fraud. Travis resigned later that evening after, he said, the White House made clear that he would not succeed Krebs as head of the […]

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It’s hard to keep a big botnet down: TrickBot sputters back toward full health

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Mounting evidence suggests that TrickBot, the vast botnet that both U.S. Cyber Command and a Microsoft-led coalition sought to disable around the 2020 elections, is on the mend and evolving. The separate campaigns featured Microsoft going to court to disable IP addresses associated with TrickBot command and control servers, as Cyber Command’s operation also targeted command and control servers.  Hints of its rebound began in late October, shortly after signs of success in the bids to dismantle the TrickBot network of zombie computers. While Cyber Command and Microsoft always billed their assaults as a disruption rather than a full takedown, the TrickBot comeback is proof that it’s difficult to kill a botnet outright. Botnets are dangerous because they can be used to conduct a range of harmful activities, like distributed denial of service attacks that overwhelm a site with traffic or ransomware attacks, the latter of which were a major issue of concern for U.S. national security […]

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Senators warn YouTube to buck up on misinformation

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YouTube has found itself in the crosshairs of a group of Democratic senators who want the Alphabet-owned video platform to take down misinformation about elections, false claims of voter fraud and content that could fuel civil unrest. In the buildup to the 2020 U.S. presidential elections, YouTube chose to not take down content that promotes false claims about the election or that challenges the credibility of election’s results. That policy is not enough to curb misinformation, the senators warned in a letter they sent Tuesday to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki. “[T]he platform is now home to an ‘onslaught of videos aiming to undermine the legitimacy of the election,’” wrote senators Bob Menendez of New Jersey, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, Gary Peters of Michigan and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. “These videos seek to undermine our democracy and cast doubt on the legitimacy of President-elect Biden’s incoming administration. Moreover, because the current president has […]

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DHS’s cyber agency is led by career official Brandon Wales. For now.

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Less than 24 hours after President Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, the dust is still settling at the Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity agency that Krebs led. Officials at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) who have spent months refuting conspiracy theories and battling disinformation surrounding the election say they will continue to do so, despite a White House purge of the agency’s leadership. CISA is now led on an acting basis by Brandon Wales, a 15-year veteran of DHS who is deeply familiar with CISA’s operations after serving as the agency’s top career civil servant. A former senior cybersecurity adviser to then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Wales is well-liked at CISA and known for his technical acumen. How long Wales will lead the agency, though, remains unclear. The dismantling of CISA’s leadership has employees on edge. And CISA’s continued work to debunk fraud claims could draw additional White House scrutiny. After Trump fired Krebs via tweet on […]

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Trump fires CISA chief Chris Krebs, who guarded the 2020 election from interference and domestic misinformation

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President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he has fired Chris Krebs, a widely respected Department of Homeland Security official who helped protect the 2020 election from hacking and disinformation, the latest in a series of purges of officials deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. As head of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Krebs has repeatedly debunked baseless claims from Trump and his allies of widespread electoral fraud while generally avoiding mentioning the president by name. CISA’s “rumor control” public website, which refuted conspiracy theories about stolen votes or dead people voting, reportedly angered the White House. Trump tweeted Tuesday evening that he fired Krebs because his agency issued a “highly inaccurate” statement that the 2020 election was secure. That statement, which was signed by numerous election officials across the country, and backed up by independent security experts, said the election was the most secure in U.S. history. A former Microsoft executive whom […]

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