Tech companies offered free products to help secure the election. Now what?

The unprecedented foreign hacking and misinformation campaigns that were reported around the 2016 U.S. election cast a cloak of doubt over the integrity of the country’s democratic process. The threat sent government officials on the federal, state and local level scrambling to ensure that the country’s voting machines, voter registration systems, pollbooks, results-reporting websites and other election technology is ready for the midterm elections. Over the past few months, about a dozen technology companies have announced programs offering state and local election offices or political organizations free services to help them fend off looming threats, including email protection, extra security for cloud applications, basic antivirus coverage, multi-factor authentication tools and several other types of products. As elections in the U.S. are run by the states, securing a federal election requires a massive coordinated effort. The federal government has been playing a greater role to this end since 2016, but can only do so much without […]

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Pentagon hackers-for-hire take just 4 hours to find critical vulnerability in sensitive system

This article first appeared on FedScoop. The Pentagon’s cybersecurity swat team has hosted highly-publicized challenges to find flaws in department and military branch websites, but it also recently orchestrated a more secret, complex project. The Defense Digital Service wanted to hire outside researchers to root out vulnerabilities in systems carrying sensitive department data — but without worrying about compromising the […]

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