Category Archives: nation-state hackers

DHS to unveil National Risk Management Center

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The Department of Homeland Security will on Tuesday unveil a new interagency center to help critical-infrastructure firms assess the risk that a ceaseless stream of cyberthreats pose to their networks. The National Risk Management Center is meant to be a one-stop shop for helping private companies manage their cybersecurity risk – and develop ways to mitigate it. Officials are expected to announce the center at a conference in New York City on Tuesday that will feature Vice President Mike Pence, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and other cabinet officials. The new initiative follows months of public statements from DHS officials about the need to better understand cyber risk spread across sectors.  Effectively assessing risk requires “visibility into an often-opaque supply-chain process and a clear understanding of the threat,” Jeanette Manfra, DHS’s top cybersecurity official, said in April. With the private sector telling DHS it needs more actionable threat data, the department has […]

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McCaul: U.S. should go on the cyber offensive if Russia hacks midterms

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The United States should respond with offensive cyber operations if the Russian government tries to meddle in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections like it did in the 2016 presidential election, according to an influential Republican lawmaker. “Personally, if [the Russians] attempt to do that again in the 2018 midterms, I think there should be an offensive response to it,” Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told reporters Wednesday. In January 2017, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that Russian government-linked hackers meddled in the 2016 presidential election as part of a broad Kremlin-backed effort to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump. Over the last several months, senior U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly warned of the possibility of renewed Russian information operations ahead of midterm elections this fall. While nothing on the scale of the 2016 meddling has been detected yet for the 2018 cycle, a public […]

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Krebs: Companies need ‘military-grade’ investments to defend against foreign government hackers

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Last year was a “seminal year” for nation-state-backed cyberattacks from American adversaries, a top Department of Homeland Security official said Wednesday, adding that companies may need U.S. government support to cope with such advanced threats. “We’ve known for years that there are primarily four nation-state actors that are most active in the cybersecurity space, but push really came to shove” in 2017, Christopher Krebs said Wednesday, referring to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. American companies can handle most cyberthreats through their own security investments, but a “military-grade level of investment” is needed to cope with nation-state hackers, Krebs, DHS’s top infrastructure security official, said at a conference in Washington, D.C. Experts say it is very difficult for a company of any size to cope with advanced and well-resourced hackers, but DHS is trying to make the fight less lopsided by providing companies with threat intelligence and risk assessments. Further, basic practices like […]

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DHS chief: We’re cracking down on hackers more than Obama did

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The U.S. government is trying to more effectively deter cyberattacks by imposing clear consequences on nation-state-linked hackers, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said Thursday, casting the Trump administration as tougher on the issue than the Obama administration. “This is one of those areas where deterrence has to be clear,” Nielsen said Thursday at a Capitol Hill security event. “We will no longer stand by while nation-states attack the government or our private sector entities.” “For so long, we’ve had these attacks, it’s taken us over a year to attribute it in some cases,” she said. “Then you attribute it, nothing happens.” Under both presidential administrations, the U.S. has clamped down on hackers linked with the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian governments through indictments and sanctions. In 2014, Obama’s Department of Justice brought the first U.S. charges of cyber-espionage against a nation-state with the indictment of five Chinese military officers. In March, Trump’s DOJ indicted nine Iranian […]

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Lawmakers advance bill to codify DHS cyber center for industrial plants

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The House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday advanced legislation that would establish a Department of Homeland Security cybersecurity center as the lead agency for handling threats to industrial control systems, like those underpinning the energy sector. The bill would make clear that DHS’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) is the hub for mitigating ICS vulnerabilities and provide the private sector with a “permanent place for assistance to address cybersecurity risk,” Rep. Don Bacon, R-N.E., who introduced the bill, said at a markup. “We know we are vulnerable…to these cyberattacks on our energy grid, and the time is now to start building that resiliency in our energy grid,” Bacon stated. With DHS and the Department of Energy both concerning themselves with ICS, “there’s some ambiguity [on] who does what” on the issue, Bacon told CyberScoop after the hearing. “The NCCIC has been doing a lot of this,” he explained. […]

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Rick Perry: U.S. must use technology prowess to defend power grid

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The United States must harness its technical know-how to defend energy infrastructure from advanced hacking, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Monday, touting his department’s investments in cybersecurity research and development. Cyberattacks have gotten easier to carry out and their sophistication, scale and frequency have increased, Perry said in a speech at a Department of Energy conference in Austin. “The sustained and growing threat of cyberattacks to our energy infrastructure requires us to think differently, to act proactively,” the former Texas governor said. That means investing in new technologies to fortify the grid against hackers whose toolkits are only expanding, according to Perry. DOE in April announced $25 million in funding for research and development to boost cybersecurity in energy delivery systems. Last September, the department awarded $50 million through its national laboratories to improve energy-sector resiliency, including about $20 million in cybersecurity projects. With the unveiling of a new cybersecurity strategy […]

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Rick Perry: U.S. must use technology prowess to defend power grid

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The United States must harness its technical know-how to defend energy infrastructure from advanced hacking, Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Monday, touting his department’s investments in cybersecurity research and development. Cyberattacks have gotten easier to carry out and their sophistication, scale and frequency have increased, Perry said in a speech at a Department of Energy conference in Austin. “The sustained and growing threat of cyberattacks to our energy infrastructure requires us to think differently, to act proactively,” the former Texas governor said. That means investing in new technologies to fortify the grid against hackers whose toolkits are only expanding, according to Perry. DOE in April announced $25 million in funding for research and development to boost cybersecurity in energy delivery systems. Last September, the department awarded $50 million through its national laboratories to improve energy-sector resiliency, including about $20 million in cybersecurity projects. With the unveiling of a new cybersecurity strategy […]

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House of Representatives to boost info-sharing program with Five Eyes allies

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The U.S. House of Representatives is looking to ramp up a cyberthreat information-sharing program with the parliaments of allies Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and Britain, according to House CISO Randy Vickers. The information traded could be unclassified threat intelligence used to bolster the legislative bodies’ security. Vickers said there were already strong information-sharing relationships with the allied parliaments, the goal was simply to leverage them more. “We’re looking at ways to better share information on a more routine basis,” Vickers told CyberScoop Thursday. “It really is just about ensuring that we all have a common knowledge across our environments.” In practice, the program could be as simple as notifying the group of a new cybersecurity advisory from the Department of Homeland Security, Vickers said on the sidelines of the Cyberthreat Intelligence Forum presented by FireEye and produced by CyberScoop and FedScoop. The U.S. and the four other countries comprise the Five Eyes […]

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The uphill battle to relaunch State Department’s cybersecurity policy office

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Be it through legislation or some internal decree, restoring the State Department’s cybersecurity policy office to a prominent place in the agency can’t come soon enough for advocates of U.S. digital diplomacy. Analysts and former government officials say U.S. leadership in shaping international behavior in cyberspace has stalled at a time when nation-state hacking groups are flexing their muscles. “I worry about a gap that leaves allies wondering and adversaries savoring the chance to take advantage of the perceived lack of U.S. leadership,” Christopher Painter, State’s former cybersecurity coordinator, told CyberScoop. “When you have diminished resources [and] when you have uncertainty, inevitably that causes some loss of momentum.” In the eight months since former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said he would downgrade the department’s cybersecurity office, the United States has blamed North Korea for the destructive WannaCry ransomware attack, indicted Iranian hackers for terabytes worth of intellectual property theft, and […]

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Nation-state hackers hit Cisco switches

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Hackers, some of them backed by a nation-state, have attacked Cisco switches in multiple countries, the tech giant’s cyberthreat intelligence division has revealed. Some of the attacks “are believed to be associated with nation-state actors, such as those described” in a recent Department of Homeland Security report that said Russian government hackers were targeting multiple U.S. industries, Cisco said. The campaign disclosed by Cisco exploits a protocol in a tool called Cisco Smart Install Client that installs switches. The protocol can be abused to conduct a series of actions, including modifying a server setting, to let an attacker execute Cisco networking software commands. Cisco used the scanning tool Shodan to identify more than 168,000 systems that could be vulnerable to this attack. A March 15 DHS report blamed Russian government hackers for a multi-stage hacking campaign against the nuclear, critical manufacturing, and other U.S. sectors. The U.S. effort to call out alleged […]

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