Category Archives: Elections

DHS, FBI promise to improve defense of election systems ahead of 2018 campaign season

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The Department of Homeland Security is promising to better coordinate with state and local government officials in efforts to defend election systems from hackers in the upcoming 2018 congressional campaign season. The pledge, by acting Secretary Elaine Duke, comes after a chaotic 2016 cycle which saw hackers probe and in some cases breach voter registration databases in multiple states. There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that election results were significantly altered as a result of these intrusions. Duke spoke Wednesday on Capitol Hill alongside FBI Director Christopher Wray and Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, in a congressional hearing focused on existing homeland security threats. At one point, lawmakers pressed Duke and Wray to answer how their individual agencies were preparing for possible cyberattacks against election systems in the coming year — especially those that could go further and potentially impact voting tallies. Duke highlighted the role DHS […]

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The endless hunt: Looking for patterns in malware data

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“No research is ever really finished,” observes Kenneth Geers, senior research scientist for Comodo. He’s talking about the second massive set of data he’s crunched in two weeks: The Comodo Threat Labs Q2 2017 report. It was only a week ago that Geers released Comodo’s Q1 data — the first time the company sought to leverage the huge amounts of information about malware attacks gathered by the 90 million installs of its software across the world. This time around, the dataset is four times as large — more than 97 million malware incidents — and Geers told CyberScoop the analysis he’s been able to do on it so far is “just scratching the surface.” “I’m going to be working all week,” he said, preparing for a presentation at DEF CON Saturday. In Q1, he demonstrated that “different malware types map against [national] GDP per capita.” The more advanced types of malware, like backdoors, make up a greater […]

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FBI Director: If left unchecked, Russian hackers will change vote tallies in a future U.S. election

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FBI Director James Comey predicts that if left undeterred, Russian hackers will one day attempt to change the vote tally in a U.S. election. Comey said as much during a public hearing Wednesday in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Members asked Comey a series of questions concerning Russia’s ability to conduct damaging cyber-operations against both the U.S. and its allies. “In my view, [Russia is] the greatest threat of any nation on earth given their intention and capability,” Comey blankly stated. Last year, in the months preceding the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 8, the Homeland Security Department discovered a series of digital attacks aimed specifically at voter registration databases used in different states. These systems are disconnected from and do not affect machines that record or tally actual votes, and there is no evidence to suggest that Russian hackers were able to alter vote counts in the 2016 election. Some officials fear, however, that […]

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Google will provide free cybersecurity tools for election organizers in Europe

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As the threat of cyberattacks looms over Europe in the months preceding several crucial elections, Alphabet subsidiary companies Jigsaw and Google announced Tuesday the launch of a security tool package to help election organizers and civic groups ward off hackers and other forms of digital interference. The announcement comes one day after FBI Director James Comey told lawmakers that he fully expects Russian intelligence services to continue interfering in the U.S. electoral process because of their apparent success in 2016. Known as “Protect Your Election,” the Google-Jigsaw cybersecurity software package is designed for use by a nontechnical audience and it will be provided for free to groups in France, South Korea, Germany and counties with subsequent elections, according to Jigsaw, the corporation’s tech incubator. Among other capabilities, the toolset provides technology to help stop distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, spot phishing emails and better protect passwords. DDoS-style attacks work by […]

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Former Fetish Model Ancilla van de Leest Is Leading the Dutch Pirate Party to Promote Privacy

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According to the leader of the Dutch Pirate Party, there is a serious lack of the necessary technological knowledge in Dutch parliament. Continue reading Former Fetish Model Ancilla van de Leest Is Leading the Dutch Pirate Party to Promote Privacy→

Experts warn Congress of ongoing Russian information warfare against Europe

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Russian intelligence forces are currently involved in an online disinformation campaign to undermine several crucial European elections, former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves told lawmakers during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Thursday. IIves was one of four experts who spoke Thursday on Capitol Hill about Russian hacking and propaganda efforts designed to undermine The North Atlantic Treaty Organization and European Union. IIves was president of between 2006 and 2016, during a period in which Russian hackers launched a massive distributed denial of service-style attack on the country’s government agencies and private sector. “I would argue this will be the main battlefield over the next year,” IIves. “There are a number of key elections coming up among major countries … [and] in all cases we’ve seen significant meddling. The Dutch are so afraid they’ve decided to go back to paper balloting because of what might happen.” Lawmakers in Washington have […]

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