Wyden pushes Supreme Court to adopt email encryption standards that it currently doesn’t use

Warning that the U.S. Supreme Court’s emails “remain needlessly exposed to surveillance and potentially compromised by third parties,” Sen. Ron Wyden urged change Monday within the judicial branch and continued his office’s public campaign to bolster information security within the federal government. Wyden, D-Ore,, published a letter to the U.S. Supreme Court urging their director of information technology to adopt STARTTLS encryption “to better protect the privacy and security of the Court’s email communications.” Pointing to wide adoption of STARTTLS in private industry and across government, Wyden pushed the Supreme Court to use the technology because without it “email messages sent to and from the Supreme Court remain needlessly exposed to surveillance and potentially compromised by third parties.” The letter echoes another sent by Wyden earlier this year urging the Defense Information Systems Agency to implement STARTTLS in their email systems. “Major technology companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple […]

The post Wyden pushes Supreme Court to adopt email encryption standards that it currently doesn’t use appeared first on Cyberscoop.

Continue reading Wyden pushes Supreme Court to adopt email encryption standards that it currently doesn’t use

Wyden urges DHS to adopt secure email authentication protocol

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has asked the Department of Homeland Security to move the federal government to adopt a protocol that would defend and protect government offices from email spoofing and phishing attempts. According to a letter sent to acting DHS Deputy Undersecretary of Cybersecurity Jeanette Manfra, Wyden wants the government to adopt Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. Widely known as DMARC, the protocol is technical standard finalized in 2015 by contributors including Google, Yahoo, Mail.ru, JPMorganChase and Symantec. The push for widespread adoption of DMARC is particularly timely now in the wake of a June 2017 report concluding that less than one-third of the largest 98 public and private hospitals in the United States secure their email with the technology. The same email-based threats faced by private enterprise have hit the U.S. government, especially in the last year. “The threat posed by criminals and foreign governments impersonating U.S. government agencies is real,” Wyden wrote. […]

The post Wyden urges DHS to adopt secure email authentication protocol appeared first on Cyberscoop.

Continue reading Wyden urges DHS to adopt secure email authentication protocol