Collaborate Disseminate
Reality Leigh Winner, the NSA contractor who leaked sensitive information to the Intercept last year, was sentenced to 63 months in prison last week along with three years of supervised release. Continue reading NSA leaker Reality Winner gets 63 months in jail
Numerous Trump administration officials spent Thursday expounding upon the efforts the government is taking to curb Russian-linked actors’ efforts to interfere with the 2018 midterm elections. National security adviser John Bolton, for example, issued a vigorous defense of President Donald Trump’s “extensive, historic” efforts to strengthen the security of U.S. elections while offering lawmakers classified briefings on these efforts. In a rebuttal to congressional Democrats, who have criticized Trump’s election-security efforts as insufficient, Bolton asserted that National Security Council meetings on the subject in July and May were evidence of “a level of dedication and action with respect to this threat that far exceeds that of previous administrations.” In a letter to five Democratic senators, Bolton said the Trump administration is taking “unprecedented action to punish Russia for its efforts to disrupt the political and electoral processes core to American democracy and the American way of life.” The Senate Democrats had written Bolton asking the White […]
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Jonathan Homer says Russian hackers have snared “hundreds of victims” in the utilities and equipment sectors and “got to the point where they could have thrown switches” in a way that could have caused power blackouts. Continue reading Russian hackers are ready to disrupt US energy utilities, says DHS
Two weeks before assuming the office of the presidency, Donald Trump was shown highly classified intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin had personally ordered a wave of Russian-sponsored hacking and disinformation blitzes to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. According to the New York Times, who first reported the news Wednesday, the evidence was compiled from Russian military officers’ digital footprints, intercepted by U.S. and allied intelligence agencies, as well as top-secret sources close to Putin, who told the CIA how Moscow orchestrated its digital interference operation. Speaking to CNN on Thursday morning, James Clapper confirmed that Trump was briefed on Putin’s personal involvement in Russia’s 2016 election cyberattacks, adding: “we left very highly classified written documents that laid out in more detail the evidence.” The directors of the CIA, NSA, FBI, and national intelligence, John Brennan, Michael Rogers, James Comey, and Clapper, respectively, briefed the president-elect on January 6, […]
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Russia hacked the Clinton campaign in large part because John Podesta didn’t bother to turn on two-factor authentication. Continue reading Basic Digital Security Could Have Prevented One of the Biggest Political Scandals in American History
Ahead of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore next week, U.S. cybersecurity researchers say that Russian and Chinese hackers are scaling up cyber-espionage operations against South Korea. Cybersecurity giant FireEye found that operations targeting South Korean government ministries and financial institutions were carried out as recently as last month. The firm uncovered multiple incidents of hacking attempts linked to Russian and Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. The revelations underscore the complicated threat landscape facing Seoul. It is still unclear who exactly was targeted and whether the attackers succeeded in breaching important political organizations, FireEye researchers said. South Korea, a key U.S. ally, must play a delicate balancing act. It has vowed to pursue a diplomatic breakthrough and angled for a better relationship with its northern neighbor, but all bets are off in cyber space. As CyberScoop recently reported, despite Pyongyang and Seoul vowing to pacify the Korean Peninsula, the latter […]
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On Feb. 16, a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. returned an indictment against 13 Russian citizens and three Russian companies for a scheme involving information warfare against the political institutions of the United States. Does this portend a … Continue reading What the Meuller/Russia Indictment Means for Cybersecurity
When it comes to pointing the finger for last year’s historically-disruptive NotPetya cyberattack, nobody could accuse the US and UK of dodging the issue. Continue reading US and UK condemn Russia for NotPetya
The nation’s top intelligence official will have to assess spy agencies’ response to Russian election meddling last year, devise a whole-of-government strategy for combatting similar effort in the future, if a Senate bill that advanced this week becomes law. The bill, S.1761, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018, passed out of committee this week with a single vote dissenting. The bill in its current form would require a number of reports to Congress on a variety of issues regarding cybersecurity incidents targeting the federal government in the last year. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore, said in a statement he voted no, “over a provision that could set a troubling constitutional precedent” — by identifying Wikileaks and its senior leaders as “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors.” “My concern,” he said, “is that the use of the novel phrase ‘non-state hostile intelligence service’ may have legal, […]
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Despite new evidence from a leaked NSA report that Russian hackers sought to compromise state and local election technology, the officials in charge are still vigorously opposing the federal designation of their polling systems as critical infrastructure. “It’s unclear how this situation would change anyone’s opinions about the [critical infrastructure] designation,” Kay Stimson of the National Association of Secretaries of State told CyberScoop. NASS represents the state-level officials responsible for tabulating election results. Stimson added that officials didn’t get any additional resources to defend their networks as a result of the January 2017 announcement by the Department of Homeland Security, which many saw as a federal power grab. Federal officials have stressed that state or local participation in any DHS programs is voluntary, and suggested that DHS expertise might be able to help election officials secure themselves against online attacks. Stimson said officials had asked DHS for a briefing about the leaked information. The document, leaked […]
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