Category Archives: ODNI

U.S. intelligence chief lays out threats to U.S. infrastructure, efforts to protect it

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The top U.S. intelligence official painted a grim picture on Friday of the many types of cyber threats the U.S. faces across critical infrastructure sectors and highlighted the ways the government is countering them. “These attacks come in different forms. Some are tailored to achieve very tactical goals, while others are implemented for strategic purposes, including the possibility of a crippling cyber attack against our critical infrastructure,” said Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, speaking at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank. “But all of these desperate efforts share a common purpose to exploit America’s openness in order to undermine our long-term competitive advantage.” Coats said that U.S.’s digital infrastructure is under constant attack from foreign entities including China, Iran and North Korea, but he singled out Russia as the “most aggressive” one, highlighting the country’s reported efforts to use hacking and information campaigns to influence U.S. elections. The […]

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Inside the U.S.’ new state-of-the-art cyberwarfare bunker

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The command post for any future U.S.-backed cyberwar is now officially open. Last week, NSA and U.S. Cyber Command leaders posed together and smiled for pictures during a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate the completion of a new, state-of-the-art spy bunker named the “Integrated Cyber Center,” or ICC. Bland in name alone, the groundbreaking facility located inside Fort Meade in Maryland represents the latest step taken by the federal government to equip U.S. spies and a growing force of “cyberwarriors” with the physical infrastructure necessary to combat foreign threats online. Hackers linked to Russia, China, North Korea and Iran have each respectively penetrated important U.S. political groups, government agencies, entertainment studios and U.S. energy companies in recent years. These types of breaches have led lawmakers to openly question whether the federal government is doing enough to deter hackers. “Today we are at the dawn of a new era, facing the reality of wars […]

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Trump administration may throw out the approval process for cyberwarfare

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Members of the White House’s National Security Council are pushing to rescind Presidential Policy Directive 20, an important policy memorandum that currently guides the approval process for government-backed cyberattacks, three current U.S. officials familiar with the matter tell CyberScoop. The effort is driven in part by a desire from some NSC staff to create a more streamlined channel for military leaders to get their offensive cyber operations greenlit, insiders familiar with the matter said. The sources spoke under the condition of anonymity to freely discuss sensitive national security matters. The move comes as lawmakers openly question whether U.S. Cyber Command, the nation’s premier cyber warfare unit, is hamstrung from responding to Russian meddling due to bureaucratic red tape. CyberScoop previously reported that multiple congressional committees are considering policies that could empower the military’s cyber mission. But the push for change faces resistance from the intelligence community and several other federal agencies involved in cybersecurity. Senior […]

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ODNI holds classified briefings on election security for all 50 states

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State election officials from all 50 states are to receive classified briefings from intelligence officials Friday and Sunday about threats to election security. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced on Thursday that it will hold the briefings in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI “as part of an ongoing effort to ensure the integrity and security of the nation’s election infrastructure.” The briefings coincide with annual conferences for the National Association of Secretaries of State and the National Association of State Election Directors being held through the weekend in Washington, D.C. Since the 2016 presidential election, lawmakers have been calling on the intelligence community to expedite the security clearance process for state election officials in order for them to review information about election threats. Several bills have been introduced in Congress in recent months with involvement from both parties that would set requirements around this issue. The […]

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Trisis has the security world spooked, stumped and searching for answers

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At first, technicians at multinational energy giant Schneider Electric thought they were looking at the everyday software used to manage equipment inside nuclear and petroleum plants around the world. They had no idea that the code carried the most dangerous industrial malware on the planet. More than four months have passed since a novel, highly sophisticated piece of malware forced an important oil and gas facility in the Middle East to suddenly shut down, but cybersecurity analysts still don’t know who wrote the code. Since last August, multiple teams of researchers in the public and private sectors have been examining what the perpetrators planted inside a nondescript Saudi computer network. It’s a rare case involving a computer virus specially engineered to sabotage industrial control systems (ICS) — the gear that keeps factories and refineries running. Manipulating these systems can have a destructive impact far beyond the network. Today, the incident’s magnitude and implications are […]

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Former top spy says U.S. not positioned to fight information wars in cyberspace

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When U.S. officials realized last year that Russian intelligence services’ hacking into the IT systems of the Democratic National Committee was just one part of a full-featured information warfare operation, they faced a number of immediate problems, a former White House insider said Wednesday. James Clapper, who was director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama, said the first dilemma was well-understood: how to warn the American people about the Russian effort to meddle with the election without appearing to put a thumb on the scale. There was a second and much less well-understood problem, though: how to fight back. “We don’t really have a good way to respond” to the efforts like those that were designed to damage Democratic candidate Hilary Clinton, Clapper said at Gigamon’s Public Sector Cybersecurity Summit. The information warfare created fake news as well as the real thing — like the stories that came out of the documents dumped from the DNC hack. […]

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IARPA director: New homomorphic crypto is ‘math magic’

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The latest kind of advanced encryption could soon allow classified computing to be done on unclassified computer systems, a senior intelligence official said Thursday. “That’s really one of the next places [we’re] likely to look — Can we use homomorphic encryption to do secure multiparty computation?” Jason Matheny, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, told the Billington Cybersecurity Summit. Matheny said that his agency had first started researching homomorphic encryption in 2011 to fix a gap in the way data was kept secure. The method allows analysis on encrypted data without the need for decryption. “We were good at protecting [data] at rest, we were good at protecting it in transit, but not while it was being processed,” Matheny said. The problem: In order to perform any computational function, even as simple as a search, the data had to be decrypted, then processed. And at that point an adversary who […]

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Intelligence community seeks answers in aftermath of Harold Martin case

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The arrest and then recent indictment of Harold T. Martin III, a 20-year veteran of the intelligence community who is accused of carrying out the biggest theft of classified information in U.S. history, is causing leaders on Capitol Hill and in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to re-examine exactly how the government defends […]

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Top U.S. intelligence official: Media is wrong about low morale

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The issue of sinking morale within the U.S. intelligence community is a myth fabricated by the media, said a top U.S. intelligence official who spoke Thursday at the National Press Club. “I am in the intelligence community, I have spent time in the FBI, in NCSC now and CIA, and I don’t see a dip […]

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Top U.S. intelligence official: Media is wrong about low morale

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The issue of sinking morale within the U.S. intelligence community is a myth fabricated by the media, said a top U.S. intelligence official who spoke Thursday at the National Press Club. “I am in the intelligence community, I have spent time in the FBI, in NCSC now and CIA, and I don’t see a dip […]

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