Category Archives: DHS IG

Watchdog: DHS prioritizing speed over context for AIS program

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Sharing threat intelligence with the private sector at the Department of Homeland Security is hamstrung by prioritizing speed of release over adding context or other value; and because there’s no integration between classified and unclassified databases, leaving analysts with only half the picture, an agency watchdog said Monday. “Given these limitations” to DHS’s automated information sharing (AIS) program “federal and private sector partners sometimes rely on other systems or participate in other DHS information sharing programs to obtain quality cyber threat data,” finds a report from the department’s inspector general. The IG was mandated by the 2015 Cybersecurity Act to report biennially on the department’s efforts with regards to the AIS program. The Cybersecurity Act created liability protections for private sector companies that shared cyberthreat information with the federal government through DHS, and usher in a new era in which “indicators of compromise” — the tell-tale signs of a cyber-intrusion — could […]

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DHS inspector general: Georgia’s election systems weren’t hacked

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The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has concluded that the department did not breach Georgia’s voting system, according to a letter issued to Congress on Monday. The letter by Inspector General John Roth stipulates that his office’s Digital Forensics and Analysis Unit recreated a contractor’s actions from Nov. 15, 2016: accessing a public page on the Georgia Secretary of State’s website in order to verify security guards’ weapons certification licensing, which a contractor then copied into a spreadsheet file. The letter was sent to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which asked for an independent investigation in January. The incident came to light last December, when Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp claimed someone from DHS tried to breach his office’s firewall after the state’s third-party cybersecurity provider detected an IP address from the federal department’s Southwest D.C. office trying to penetrate the state’s firewall. Since then, the […]

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