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In this election security drill, Massachusetts cops battle hackers to protect the vote

Posted on September 24, 2018 by Sean Lyngaas

With just weeks until the midterm elections, police in Massachusetts gathered last Thursday to practice responding to cyberattacks from an adversary bent on disrupting the democratic process. The simulation, hosted at the Boston headquarters of network security company Cybereason, pitted a police team that included former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis against a red team portraying hackers looking to exacerbate political divisions. The tabletop drill was a strategic duel, with the red team trying to suppress the vote and the cops mobilizing resources in response. The aim of the exercise was to show state and municipal authorities the type of coordinated and clever cyberattacks on critical infrastructure that are possible, according to Cybereason’s Ross Rustici, who helped devise the exercise. Davis said that point hit home. “I think it was an eye-opening experience for everyone who was there,” he told CyberScoop, adding: “People left that exercise with the sober realization that […]

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House committee dings DHS’s cyber intelligence for fusion centers

Posted on November 8, 2017 by Shaun Waterman

Fewer than one-in-four Homeland Security fusion centers across the country receive cyberthreat reporting or other intelligence products from DHS’ National Protection and Programs Directorate, hampering their nascent efforts to help defend the country against online attacks, a congressional report said Tuesday. Those efforts are further hampered because fusion center representatives do not sit on the floor of NPPD’s 24 hour watch center, the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC), the majority staff of the House Homeland Security Committee found. The report includes material from dozens of interviews and a long survey completed by 68 major fusion centers across the country. The centers were set up to integrate state and local law enforcement agencies into DHS’ homeland protection mission by providing them with threat warnings they could use to inform their local priorities and by vacuuming up local intelligence reporting in the hope that it could cast light on national trends or geographically dispersed terrorist […]

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Election officials criticize Harvard study of voter registration vulnerabilities

Posted on September 6, 2017 by Shaun Waterman

Election officials are pushing back against a new Harvard study saying hackers could disenfranchise Americans in 35 states and the District of Columbia by exploiting vulnerabilities in online voter registration systems. The study published Wednesday in the journal Technology Science says hackers could buy — either from commercial data brokers or more cheaply from cybercriminals — all the personal data they need about millions of Americans to fraudulently alter voter registration records online. Calling it “voter identity theft,” journal Editor-in-Chief Latanya Sweeney, who is also a Harvard professor, and co-authors Ji Su Yoo and Jinyan Zang say a broad scale attack on several states could be carried out with data costing just a few thousand dollars. But state elections officials told CyberScoop the report was overblown. “The study doesn’t reflect the safeguards that the states have in place to guard against this sort of thing,” said Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson, this year’s president of the National […]

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Pro-ISIS script kiddies hit Ohio state websites

Posted on June 26, 2017 by Shaun Waterman

Several state government websites in Ohio, including those of former Gov. John Kasich and his wife, Ohio First Lady Karen Kasich, were defaced over the weekend in a rash of hacking activity aimed at state and local governments claimed by Algeria-based pro-ISIS hacktivists. The defaced websites played the Islamic call to prayer and threatened President Donald Trump, noting that he would be held accountable for “every drop of blood flowing in Muslim countries” and ended “I Love Islamic state [sic].” An Ohio official told the AP that the hacks happened about 11am on Sunday, and the sites were all restored by Monday morning, as were most of the others struck. According to Zone-H, an Estonia-based site that has tracked website defacements like these for 15 years, the targets included government websites of Howard County, Maryland and other towns and counties in New York, Idaho and California. Zone-H preserved a mirror of the defaced Ohio governor’s site […]

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