Collaborate Disseminate
National Cyber Director Chris Inglis said he has worked with Fick many times over the years and believes he would excel.
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Also an author, Fick spoke at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
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Researchers shared the data to provide a more complete context about the data and questions surrounding it, they said.
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The Biden administration is requesting additional funds from Congress to help Ukraine with its digital defenses, strengthen cybersecurity in Europe and enhance U.S. capabilities to respond to the fallout from the Russian invasion. The overall fiscal 2022 supplemental request, sent to Capitol Hill this week, seeks $10 billion in Ukraine-related needs and $22.5 billion in funding related to COVID-19. Among the bigger pots of cybersecurity-focused funding the administration is requesting is $1.25 billion for the Defense Department to assist Ukraine with support on “operational surges across multiple national defense components, including accelerated cyber capabilities, weapons systems upgrades, increased intelligence support, and classified programs.” A $1.75 billion request for the State Department to provide economic aid to Ukraine includes support for “continuity of government” and resilience work, including cybersecurity and efforts to counter disinformation. Other funds sought for Ukraine assistance include Department of Energy money to evaluate cybersecurity needs for connecting Ukraine’s […]
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Tuesday’s disruption of multiple Ukrainian government websites and web services for several state-owned banks — along with spam text messages falsely claiming ATMs didn’t work — were part of a coordinated operation designed to sow panic, Ukrainian government officials claimed Wednesday. The officials said it was “too early to talk about specific actors” associated with the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, but that the targeting of multiple websites, along with the text messages, suggested an extensive effort beyond the range of an individual or even a group of hackers. The remarks, from some of Ukraine’s cybersecurity and law enforcement leaders, came at a joint briefing Wednesday that the government translated into English on Twitter. The cyber incidents came as the threat of Russian military assault on Ukraine looms large, even as the Russians and NATO governments continue talks in search of a diplomatic resolution. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that 150,000 […]
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President Joe Biden said this week that the U.S. government could respond to Russian cyberattacks on Ukraine “the same way, with cyber.” The answer may have been a standard U.S. government response about responding in-kind, especially in the context of a deteriorating security situation on the border between Ukraine and Russia, with Biden predicting a Russian invasion. National security experts, foreign leaders and Biden’s domestic political opponents criticized his overall remarks on the potential Western response to any Russian incursion, but the cyber-specific comments got their own round of questions from cybersecurity experts as well. To some, Biden’s words reflected dated and misguided thinking that sounds good and tough but makes no sense in the real world. “Tit-for-tat cyber has always been a fantasy for policymakers,” tweeted Jacquelyn Schneider, a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University and expert in cyber policy and national security. She pointed to the difficulty that the […]
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Presdent Joe Biden signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law on Monday that includes nearly $2 billion for cybersecurity and related provisions. The biggest piece of digital security funding is a Federal Emergency Management Agency cyber grant program, administered in consultation with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, that would distribute $1 billion over four years to state and local governments. An additional $21 million would go toward the Office of the National Cyber Director, which has been unable to make key hires since being established earlier this year due to funding shortages. In all, the legislation — known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — is “the largest investment in the resilience of physical and natural systems in American history,” the White House boasted, one that “makes our communities safer and our infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of climate change and cyber-attacks.” […]
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A coalition of four nations — Australia, India, Japan and the U.S. — has committed to promoting cybersecurity standards and practices as one of their chief goals, in one of several recent moves from countries widely viewed as a counter to China in cyberspace and elsewhere. The group, which calls itself the Quad, held its first in-person gathering on Friday. when President Joe Biden hosted Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan at the White House. “Today, we begin new cooperation in cyberspace and pledge to work together to combat cyber threats, promote resilience and secure our critical infrastructure,” the group said in a joint statement. The group will hold more meetings between its leaders and collaborate with industry on improving in areas like the development of secure software, and building up cybersecurity workforces, according to a fact […]
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After a summer marked by big ransomware attacks from suspected Russian gangs, some of those same groups went quiet. National Cyber Director Chris Inglis said Thursday that it’s too early to tell if the trend will hold. “Those attacks have fallen off. Those syndicates have to some degree deconstructed,” Inglis said at an event hosted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute. “I think it’s a fair bet they have self-deconstructed and essentially gone cold and quiet to see whether the storm will blow over and whether they can then come back.” Whether they do so will depend largely on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin takes steps to undo the “permissive” atmosphere after U.S. President Joe Biden warned him repeatedly about ransomware attacks originating from his country. “It’s too soon to say we’re out of the woods on this,” Inglis said. The FBI blamed Russian ransomware gang REvil for […]
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The Russian approach to hacking shifted considerably over the past year, with state-sponsored attacks on commercial organizations dropping off even as the local cybercrime scene dominated the field, CrowdStrike said in a report Wednesday. From July 2020 to June of this year, Russian state-backed hacking outfits accounted for only a tiny sliver of nation-sponsored attacks aimed at commercial enterprises detected by the cyber firm’s threat hunting service, at 1% compared to China’s 69%. (The figure represents the findings from only one threat intelligence firm, and does not account for hacking campaigns that CrowdStrike might have missed.) Meanwhile, the suspected Russia-based hacking group that CrowdStrike calls Wizard Spider, and that has used the Ryuk ransomware since 2018, was responsible for double the number of detected attempted intrusions of any other cybercrime gang over the same period. While CrowdStrike didn’t have comparison figures on the percentages of state-sponsored attacks on commercial organizations […]
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