Category Archives: U.S. foreign policy

The big cyber issues Joe Biden will face his first day in office

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Joe Biden has his work cut out for him. Biden will be sworn into office on Jan. 20 with a long list of challenges ranging from the coronavirus pandemic to re-considering America’s place on the world stage. There’s also the fallout from a far-reaching hacking campaign that the U.S. has suggested is the work of the Russian government. Yet the next American president has also chosen top advisers, including his picks to lead the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA, who appear to view digital security as an integral part of policymaking. Their thinking on these issues, and whether they succeed or fail in the face of deep-seated challenges to internet security, could affect the trajectory of Biden’s presidency. Here’s a closer look at three of the more pressing cybersecurity challenges the administration will encounter. Cleaning up the SolarWinds mess, then getting proactive Biden has vowed to get to […]

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Diplomacy won’t stop North Korean hacking, South Korean officials say

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Top South Korean cybersecurity experts don’t expect Donald Trump’s diplomacy to slow down North Korean cyberattacks Speaking through interpreters at a Brookings event Thursday, two of South Korea’s leading cybersecurity experts said that they’re no longer able to cope with the sheer volume of attacks emanating from the North. In the past decade, every well-known South Korean organization has been hacked or targeted by North Korea, noted SangMyung Choi, chief of South Korea’s Computer Emergency Response Team. At the Washington, D.C., event, Choi showed off a slide deck that warned: “there is no place that is not hacked” and “we are in the real cyberwarfare.” “A lot of these attacks have not been [revealed] to the South Korean public, but today I confess to you that it’s been very prevalent,” Choi said. Since May 2018, he revealed, North Korean-backed hackers have launched spear phishing and watering hole attacks in forged documents […]

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A stolen Trump-Duterte transcript appears to be just one part of a larger hacking story

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A leaked transcript of a phone conversation between President Donald Trump and his Philippine counterpart was available online for weeks before surfacing in news reports, and it now appears to be just one of a series of sensitive Philippine government documents acquired by a hacker group with suspected ties to the Vietnamese government, according to research conducted by multiple cybersecurity experts and evidence gathered by CyberScoop. On May 15, eight days before either The Intercept or the Washington Post reported about the transcript of Trump’s call with President Rodrigo Duterte, someone uploaded what appears to be the same document to the repository VirusTotal along with malicious email attachments. How The Intercept and the Post originally obtained their own copies of the Trump-Duterte transcript — which unnamed U.S. officials confirmed as authentic — remains unclear. The leak appears to be bigger than just one document. Included in the dump were notes regarding a conversation between Duterte […]

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