Facebook should put a stop to Libra for now, says Congress
Could Facebook’s Libra cryptocurrency undermine the security of the global financial ecosystem? Continue reading Facebook should put a stop to Libra for now, says Congress
Category Archives: congress
FTC renews call for single federal privacy law
It also wants to be the country’s data-privacy police: commissioners called for more resources and ability to impose penalties. Continue reading FTC renews call for single federal privacy law
Voting-machine vendors have some serious questions to answer, senators say
While the security of the 2020 election remains a prominent topic in Washington, a group of Democratic senators is raising alarms about longer-term issues that will resonate after voters are done choosing a president about 20 months from now. The three companies that make most of the voting technology used in the U.S. must be more transparent about their plans to improve their products to meet current expectations about security and performance, says a letter Wednesday by Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and three other top Democrats. In particular, the senators say every machine should reliably produce paper records, and the companies should do far more to upgrade their products. “The integrity of our elections is directly tied to the machines we vote on — the products that you make,” says the letter from Klobuchar, Mark Warner of Virginia, Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Gary Peters of Michigan. “Despite shouldering such a massive responsibility, there has been […]
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US Senators say it shouldn’t be a secret when they’ve been hacked
Federal agencies and companies are required by law to disclose breaches, but Congress is under no such obligation – meaning that the public may have no idea that their political representatives have been hit.
Read more in my article on the Tripwire St… Continue reading US Senators say it shouldn’t be a secret when they’ve been hacked
Lawmakers want data on the number of times Senate computers have been hacked
The Senate should have an annual tally of when its computers and smartphones have been breached in order to better inform congressional cybersecurity policy, a pair of bipartisan senators says in a letter sent Wednesday to the Senate Sergeant at Arms. Describing Congress as a perennial target for hackers, Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, and Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, have asked the Senate Sergeant at Arms (SAA) to be transparent in providing lawmakers with information about the scale of successful hacks of Senate devices, including smartphones. They want annual reports sent to each senator with aggregate data on compromises of computers and other breaches of sensitive Senate data. The senators also asked the SAA to notify the Senate leadership, along with members of the rules and intelligence committees, within five days of breaches to Senate computers being discovered. Right now, lawmakers appear to be in the dark on the issue. “We believe […]
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Foreign VPN apps need a close look from DHS, senators say
The Department of Homeland Security should assess the security threat posed by foreign VPN applications to U.S. government employees, a bipartisan pair of senators says. Some popular VPN apps send a phone’s web-browsing data to servers in countries interested in targeting federal personnel, raising “the risk that user data will be surveilled by those foreign governments,” Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Ron Wyden, D-Ore., wrote in a letter to DHS Thursday. VPN providers promise to obfuscate the physical location of a web browser, but users are generally at the mercy of those companies’ decisions to collect and log data. The senators cite government warnings about products made by Chinese telecommunications companies and Russian antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab as examples of the surveillance that certain foreign technology can enable. (Kaspersky and Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE have denied those allegations.) “If U.S. intelligence experts believe Beijing and Moscow are leveraging Chinese and Russian-made technology to surveil Americans, […]
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Congress must do more in fight against global cybercrime, advocacy group says
In a speech to Interpol in November, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein lobbied other governments to do more to help Washington track down foreign cybercriminals. “By devoting appropriate resources to international cooperation efforts, we can properly address the increasing threat of cybercrime,” he said, adding later: “No nation should exempt itself from just and reasonable law enforcement cooperation.” Rosenstein was acknowledging that regardless of the Department of Justice’s investments in countering cybercrime in the United States, the department’s ability to put foreign crooks behind bars can rest, in part, on other governments’ cooperation in finding and extraditing them. That’s why, analysts say, it’s crucial to fund U.S. programs to boost foreign governments’ ability to crack down on hackers. A new advocacy effort from the think tank Third Way is trying to focus U.S. policymakers’ attention on making those programs more effective. “We think that the U.S. government should be […]
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This Congressman Wants to Build a ‘Digital’ Border Wall that Would Also Provide Rural Broadband
Congressman Will Hurd is the only Republican representing a district along the border, and he wants to use technological solutions to secure the border and possibly close the digital divide. Continue reading This Congressman Wants to Build a ‘Digital’ Border Wall that Would Also Provide Rural Broadband
Senators ask Trump administration how badly shutdown hurt federal cybersecurity
After former U.S. officials raised concerns that the longest government shutdown in history had weakened federal cybersecurity, lawmakers are asking the Trump administration how bad the damage is. “We are concerned that these circumstances have left our government and citizens vulnerable to cyberattacks,” five Democratic senators wrote in a letter Tuesday to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Gen. Paul Nakasone, head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command. The senators – Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, Massachusetts’ Ed Markey, New Mexico’s Tom Udall, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, and New Jersey’s Cory Booker – want to know how agencies are preparing to harden their networks for a future shutdown, citing past experience as a cautionary tale. During the 2013 government shutdown, the senators wrote, Chinese hackers compromised the Federal Election Commission’s computer network, crashing sensitive computer systems that disclose billions of dollars in spending each election cycle. “Shutdowns have severe […]
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The Lack of US Privacy Regulations, Nest Camera’s Hijacked – WB53
Watch this episode on our YouTube Channel! This is your Shared Security Weekly Blaze for January 28th 2019 with your host, Tom Eston. In this week’s episode: Where are the US federal privacy regulations and details on Nest camera’s being hi… Continue reading The Lack of US Privacy Regulations, Nest Camera’s Hijacked – WB53