Category Archives: RNC

Former Buttigieg CISO urges DNC to coordinate information sharing between campaigns

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Over the last year, Democratic presidential campaigns have had difficulty sharing threat data between one another, according to the former security boss for Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, raising concerns about the party’s ability to fend off possible interference ahead of the November elections. Mick Baccio, who spent roughly five months working for the now-defunct Buttigieg campaign, told CyberScoop that his team tried sharing information with other campaigns that could have helped officials protect themselves from hackers. The effort was hampered, he said, by a shortage of qualified security staffers on other campaigns, and the lack of a formal information sharing process. Baccio resigned from the campaign in January over philosophical differences. “It’s not that there’s not a want to share. It’s ‘I don’t know who to talk to,’” he said during an interview Wednesday at the Splunk Government Summit in Washington, D.C.. “I don’t know of a formal mechanism; whether it’s through the DNC, DCCC, […]

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RNC, DNC bank on Duo authentication ahead 2020 election

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The Republican National Committee is relying on authentication tools and careful social media behavior in order to avoid a devastating data breach like the kind that derailed its Democratic counterparts in 2016. The RNC, which develops and promotes the party’s platform and currently supports President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, is banking on Duo Security, which specializes in multi-factor authentication, to keep state-sponsored hackers out of party accounts, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings. Even if a user’s password credentials are stolen, an extra layer of authentication can ensure that only the legitimate account holder could access his or her communications. Since March of this year, the RNC has paid just over $1,000 per month to Duo, according to FEC filings. The RNC started using Duo in 2016, just days before the election. And it’s not just email account access the RNC is trying to protect — the RNC uses multiple layers of authentication to protect other […]

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Political parties are still struggling with cybersecurity basics

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Political parties in Europe and the U.S. have cybersecurity practices that fail to meet basic standards, leaving them vulnerable to hackers and foreign influence operations with elections rapidly approaching, according to security researchers. An assessment of 29 political parties in 11 countries released Tuesday by SecurityScorecard found that a party in France relies on end-of-life technology that has not had a security update in four to five months, for example. There also is a strain of malicious software emanating from an IP address assigned to an economic subcommittee of the European Union in Brussels right now, SecurityScorecard’s Director of Threat Intelligence, Paul Gagliardi, tells CyberScoop. And while American political parties tend to fare better than European political parties, according to the report, the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee still have weak spots. Malware in the EU The details of the report arrive just as the European Parliament elections kick off Thursday. The malware SecurityScorecard […]

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Evidence Suggests the GOP Bought at Least 17 Anti-James Comey Domains

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The Republican party has apparently created a series of domains to discredit and attack former FBI director James Comey. Meanwhile, Democratic party sympathizers appear to have created similar domains to counter the Republicans’ anti-Comey campaign. Continue reading Evidence Suggests the GOP Bought at Least 17 Anti-James Comey Domains→

200 million registered voters exposed due to open AWS repository

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A misconfigured database containing sensitive personal information of 198 million American voters was left exposed to the internet for 12 days by a Republican data analysis firm, the largest known data exposure of its kind. According to UpGuard Cyber Risk Analyst Chris Vickery, republican contractors Deep Root Analytics, TargetPoint consulting, Inc. and Data Trust stored the data on a public cloud owned by Deep Root Analytics. The names, dates of birth, home addresses, phone numbers, and voter registration details of nearly all of America’s registered voters were exposed, including “modeled” data of voter ethnicities and religions. The enormous amount of political data, compiled by the RNC and contracting firms after Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 presidential election, held around 9.5 billion data points of three out of five americans, grading the 198 million registered voters on political leanings across forty-eight categories using algorithmic modeling. Vickery discovered the Amazon Web Services S3 […]

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